


You owe me a drink

by Defira



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-19 03:38:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 37,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5952304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Across the years and across the galaxy, Ysaine Pierce and Shae Vizla keep running into each other, and falling into bed together. Or broom closets, whichever is closest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_Nar Shaddaa, The Promenade, The 13th Year of the Great Galactic War_

Nar Shaddaa smelled fucking gross. 

Ysaine wasn’t sure what it was exactly- whether it was the smog and the pollution in the air, whether it was the humidity, or whether it was the smell of several trillion beings all crammed in on top of one another. And _aliens_. Stars, she’d never seen so many aliens in her _life_ , not even on the holonet; some of them didn’t even look plausible, and she’d stared so much in the spaceport that she’d had more than one gesture and shriek rudely at her.

Or at least, she assumed it was a rude gesture? She couldn’t tell with tentacles. 

She’d asked the droid at the speeder terminal to take her somewhere where she could get a drink- and it didn’t even glance at her twice or ask for her citizen’s ID, wasn’t that a novelty- and the terrifying moment when the speeder had lifted away from the platform and she’d seen _just how high up she was_ was still unsettling her stomach. 

Her drink was cold, and the condensation on the outside of the glass made it feel like her palms weren’t that clammy after all, and she appreciated that. Even in a bar on Nar Shaddaa, with a giant golden Hutt looming behind her and a crowd of humans and humanoids and aliens jumping and grinding to a weird beat on the dance-floor nearby, she felt ridiculously conspicuous. She had to stand out like a chiss on Tatooine, the hyper-anxious teenager with the faded bruises on her face, looking over her shoulder every two minutes as if expecting to see New Adasta Military Police bearing down on top of her. 

At least the bartender hadn’t asked her for her age when she’d clumsily asked for a drink; she hadn’t actually ever had alcohol before, she had no idea what people were supposed to drink. Now she was painfully making her way through something amber coloured, something that burned and made her tongue squirm every time she tried to swallow, but it was better than sitting there swinging her feet against the bar doing nothing.

She rolled the last few credits in her hand, trying desperately to think of what to do next; she hadn’t really thought this far ahead, when she’d staggered from her stepfather’s apartment four days ago. Gabriel had sat quietly and solemnly on the couch as he’d watched her pull on her coat with shaking hands, the bruises on his little face still blooming vividly against his brown skin. 

“You just, you have to be a brave boy for me now, okay Gabby?” she’d said, smoothing down the rumbled creases of his clothes from where his father had grabbed him earlier. It had been something to do with her hands, something to try and stop them from shaking. There had been a streak of blood on his chin, and she hadn’t known whether it was from his nose or from her knuckles. “I have to go away now, and I don’t know when I’ll be back, so you have to be brave for me until I get back, okay?”

He hadn’t answered, but he’d nodded solemnly. He was only four, after all, his concept of time wasn’t all that extensive. Promising to be back later, by his standards, meant later that afternoon, if that. 

“I’m gonna put on your Wompy the Wompa holovid, okay? The one with the songs? And I want you to sit and watch Wompy, and then when it finishes-” She’d taken a deep breath, “-you need to press the big red button by the front door, okay? You know the one that Ma always told us not to touch except for emergencies?”

He’d nodded again. 

“You’re gonna press that, and someone is gonna come and take care of you. I- I promise.” She’d been crying on and off for hours now, so it hadn’t really been that surprising when the tears had spilled over again. “I love you, Gabby. Okay?”

“I love you too, Izzy,” he’d said, quietly, in the weird pattern kids had with something they’d memorized. He’d leaned off the couch as if he was going to look down the hallway, towards the back room, and she’d grabbed him in a panic and set him back on the couch.

“Just stay here, okay baby?” She’d pressed a kiss to his forehead. “Just stay here and watch Wompy, and then go press the red button, okay?”

The holovid was just long enough for her to get across town to the spaceport, and buy a one-way ticket from Ziost to Nar Shaddaa before it finished. By the time a patrol responded to the summons, she’d been breaking atmosphere above New Adasta, trying not to be sick on her first ever take-off. She didn’t know why she’d picked Nar Shaddaa, except that she knew the name from all the holodramas Ma had liked, and it wasn’t in Imperial space. A den of thieves and thugs and mercenaries seemed like just the place for a murderer to vanish into. 

And now here she was, with only one day’s worth of hormone stims left, and only a handful of credits, and only the clothes on her back to her name. Were there proper doctors on Nar Shaddaa, where you could get prescriptions? Or was it all drug labs and hacks with knives, like the holodramas made it look like? 

She hadn’t realised she was crying again until an aggressively loud cheer sounded nearby, startling her out of her morose thoughts; she wiped at her cheeks quickly, smearing her hand over her face to try and tidy up, and glanced nervously at the source of the disturbance. A rowdy group of warriors in a mish-mash of brightly coloured armour had descended on the bar, whooping and yelling and making lewd suggestions over the throbbing pulse of the music. Some of the other patrons of the bar were scowling at them, shuffling around on their bar stools and at the tables until they had their backs to them, throwing dirty looks in their direction whenever they got particularly loud. 

They were boisterous enough to make Ysaine nervous, and she turned the glass around in her hands anxiously. You didn’t tend to get large or noisy crowds much in New Adasta, it went against the order and civility that the Empire promoted as ideal, and their badly matched armour made them look like a rabble if ever she’d seen one. 

They were all openly carrying weapons, too, blasters and vibrostaffs and things she didn’t even have a name for but that looked ugly and painful. Granted, she’d seen a lot of people on Nar Shaddaa carrying weapons in the few hours she’d been here, but there was something brazen about this group, something far more overtly threatening than seeing thugs with blasters strapped to their hips lining the sides of the boulevard. 

“Fuckin’ Mando assholes,” grumbled an alien at the table next to her, some sort of big hulking thing with wrinkled skin and beady little eyes; she thought (probably unkindly) that it looked like a talking scrotum. The alien sitting with it- she thought that maybe it was a duros?- said something rapidly in Huttese, too fast for her to follow with her limited vocabulary, and the first alien snorted in amusement. 

Mando- they were Mandalorians? Her gaze swivelled back to the group, looking with a little more interest and a little less trepidation this time. 

She’d never seen Mandalorians before, although everyone had heard of them; her Ma had always liked the action films with Mandos in them, and they always seemed so fierce. Fighting and bleeding and cursing, not quite the villains but usually antagonistic in some ways- like there was one she remembered where the hero, an Imperial agent named James Bondite, got captured by a Mandalorian clan who wanted to keep him as a trophy. He’d seduced the clan leader’s wife into helping him escape, and the two of them had fled together to... do something, she couldn’t remember which villain he’d had to fight in that one. 

She didn’t think that any of the Mandalorians crowded around the bar looked like the type even a charming superspy would be able to flirt with and walk away with all his teeth, so she hugged her awful drink to her even closer, her legs hooked up high on the barstool, and tried to hunch in smaller to make herself less visible. Sort of difficult when you were sixteen and trans and six foot four and still all bloodied and bruised from having beaten your shithead of a stepfather to death four days ago- she didn’t understand how time worked when you were travelling past lightspeed, but it was probably only a week, right? 

Lost in thought as she was, she almost missed it when one of the Mandalorians reached up and pulled their helmet off, but a flash of red caught her eye and then-

-and then _stars above_ , but she was staring, and she knew she was staring but... _stars above_. 

The Mandalorian was a human, and they were one of the most beautiful individuals Ysaine had ever seen in her life- long, brassy red hair that sparked like fire in the flashing neon lights of the bar, eyebrows that she would have died for, and a pair of heavily lined eyes that were crinkled with laughter and mischief. 

Ysaine had heard the phrase _love at first sight_ before, but she never realised it felt like you’d been flattened by a charging rancor when it hit you. The Mandalorian was exquisite, with the sort of easy confidence and aggressive beauty that made her ache with equal parts jealousy and lust. Even with her hormone stims, puberty had been an awkward time, and her height didn’t exactly help her feel petite and feminine most days; by comparison, the Mandalorian looked to be solidly built, even in armour, and they came close to six feet tall, at least, and Ysaine was still struck by how incredibly delicate their features were, how sensual the shape of their lips and how intriguing the kohl-lined eyes...

Stars help her, this was like something out of a sordid space novella, swooning over a charmingly attractive criminal in a seedy dive on Nar Shaddaa. 

She would have gone back to her drink, trying desperately to contemplate her next move and putting the Mandalorians out of her mind, had she not happened to glance back at the group just as one of the other Mandalorians threw their arms around the red-headed Mandalorian’s neck from behind, forcibly dragging them back against them in something akin to a chokehold.

Ysaine was on her feet with a snarled shout, red flashing before her eyes, before she knew what she was doing.

“Give us a kiss, Shae, love,” the aggressor said loudly, their voice carrying over the pulsing beat of the dance music. They rubbed their sweaty, stubbled jaw up against the other’s face- _Shae, they’d called them Shae_ \- laughing as they made lecherous kissing noises. 

Two things happened in quick succession after that- the first being that the Mandalorian Shae brought their elbow up to crunch against the nose of the other Mandalorian, a spray of red blood flashing briefly, and the second being that Ysaine felt a beefy set of hands land on her shoulders and jerk her around forcibly, bringing her face to face with the talking scrotum. 

“You spilled my drink, ya little wretch,” it said, leaning in close enough to make the blind fury in her swing back towards panic. Ysaine was used to being the tallest person in a room, most of the time, but the alien loomed over her malevolently, beady eyes glinting with the promise of violence. “I don’t fucking like little brats thinking they can make a fool outta me.”

She gaped for a moment, trying to remember how to get her mouth to work, before she managed to stammer “I-I can buy you a new one, no worries?”

“Oh, there’s gonna be worries,” it said, its deep, rumbling voice making her shiver with fear. It had nearly a foot of height on her, and it looked strong as well as disgusting, and she’d barely eaten since she’d fled Ziost, and she’d still not recovered from the fight with her stepfather, and-

“Is there a problem here, folks?” 

And the beautiful red-headed Mandalorian was standing beside the table, one eyebrow cocked and hands on their hips as they surveyed the confrontation. There was a little splatter of blood on their cheek, just a tiny bit, and their green eyes quite literally sparkled with the promise of aggression. 

The alien still had a hold of her, big meaty hands weighing heavily on her shoulders, and it glared at the Mandalorian; they didn’t seem to feel an ounce of that loathing, standing there as casually as if they’d just asked for a score on the Huttball. Ysaine, for her part, realised she was trembling violently, the adrenalin making her teeth chatter in fear.

“Asked you a question, Houk.”

“And I wasn’t answering, Mando scum,” the Houk snarled, fingers digging into Ysaine’s shoulders. “This ain’t your business.”

“I’m making it my business,” Shae said, head cocked to the side. “You let the girl go, I’ll buy you a drink, and we’ll all go about our day without me having to wrap your gizzards around your fat ugly neck- which honestly, I’d rather not do, I don’t have the time to try and work out where the fuck your neck is in all that mess.”

“You can’t touch me,” it sneered. “I’m with the Exchange-”

“And I don’t give a shit. Ne shab’rud’ni- let the girl go.” 

There were a few tense moments when Ysaine thought the Houk- stars, what an awful name, it sounded like someone trying to vomit- wasn’t going to let the issue drop, and that things would come to blows, but then it sneered at her, the fetid sweet bitterness of the alcohol on its breath nearly making her swoon. It shoved her backwards, the bar smacking into her lower back; she grunted, stumbling to keep her feet under her before she slid embarrassingly to the floor. 

“Waste of my fucking time anyway,” it said, slapping its hands together as if it were dusting them off. “There’s better places to drink that aren’t riddled with Mando scum.”

Shae tossed a credit chip at its feet. “Buy yourself a round on me,” they said. “Maybe you’ll look less ugly if you’re face down in a puddle of your own vomit.”

The Houk roared at her, something that Ysaine suspected was more for posturing than anything else, and then it squatted- an awkward movement accompanied by grunting- and snatched up the chip. It stared with open hostility at Ysaine as it straightened, making a gesture that was probably a threat, given the way Shae took a step forward in warning. Then it turned and lumbered away, the Duros following after it a moment later. 

Ysaine let out a shaky breath that she hadn’t realised she was holding, the tension bleeding out of her and leaving her trembling.

“You okay?”

She almost flinched at the sound of Shae’s voice, so warm and with just a hint of a drawl that sounded so worldly and confident to her sheltered ears. Instead she managed to dredge up a weak nod from somewhere. 

“Don’t worry about him,” Shae said, offering her a lopsided grin that sent a swarm of butterflies through her belly. “Damn mir’osik, they’re all brawn and gung-ho stupid- good for a fight, mind you, not much good for much else though.” 

Ysaine was staring. She knew she was staring, and yet she couldn’t stop, because the very beautiful Mandalorian was standing next to her and chatting to her and smiling at her and had very probably just saved her life and she didn’t really know what to do in this sort of situation. 

Ma’s movies hadn’t really prepared her for this. 

“You got a voice?” Shae said teasingly, tilting their head to the side. “Or are you some kind of mute angel, can’t speak or else you’ll destroy the minds of us humble mortals?”

She couldn’t help it- she blushed. “I- I can talk,” she stammered. 

Shae’s smile widened. “That’s a good first step. How ‘bout a name?” 

The thought occurred to her that she ought to use a fake name, in case they put a warrant out for her arrest. Mandalorians were bounty hunters sometimes, weren’t they? Was a warrant for a teenage murderer really worth enough for anyone to want to turn her in? 

“I’m Ysaine,” she said instead, stupidly trusting, “Ysaine Pierce.”

“Ysaine Pierce,” Shae said slowly, as if tasting the sound of her name. It made her shiver. “And tell me, Ysaine Pierce, why you jumped out of your seat just now with a look on your face like you were about to murder Brakka.”

The word _murder_ made her stiffen in alarm, and something of her panic must have shown on her face, because Shae’s eyes widened. “Hey, hey now, just a little joke, it’s all good.” Shae stepped a little closer, almost into her space. “You were angry enough to piss off a Houk, so I gotta wonder what the reasoning is behind that?”

Self conscious, Ysaine rubbed absently at one of the bruises on her arm; she didn’t notice Shae’s eyes dart to the mark. “I just don’t like seeing ladies get hurt,” she said softly, and then felt her stomach lurch in a panic. “I mean- not that I’m implying that you’re definitely a lady, I don’t- I’m not presuming at all, if you, um, don’t identify as a woman- a lady, I mean.”

Could she have embarrassed herself any further? Probably, but at that moment all she wanted to do was just sink down behind one of the tacky looking plastic ferns and wait for the world to forget she was there.

Shae tipped her head back and roared with laughter; the sound went straight down her spine like lightning, setting everything within her alight on the way down. “Well, I _am_ a lady,” Shae said in amusement, once the laughter had subsided, “but I wasn’t in any trouble. Brakka is just an asshole, nothing but air whistling between his ears. Name’s Shae Vizla, by the way.”

Ysaine could feel her skin burning, and she was thankful for the gaudy neon lights making it impossible for anyone to tell she was- oh kriff wait, what about aliens with heat sensory vision? They’d be able to tell she was blushing, oh kriff-

“You okay there, kid?”

“Can the aliens tell I’m embarrassed?” she whispered frantically, before her brain could catch up to her mouth and tell her what a fucking atrociously stupid thing that was to say. 

The expression on Shae’s face might have been funny- probably would be, in a few years time when she recalled the memory- but right now it only made Ysaine want to sink into the ground in humiliation. “Do- what?” Shae laughed, shaking her head in confusion. “What the hell were you drinking, Pierce? Sounds like it’s worth trying.”

“I- I don’t-”

“You owe me a drink anyway,” she said, putting an arm around her shoulders- oh stars, her hand was on the middle of her back, _oh_ her palm was _warm_ \- and guiding her back towards the group of Mandalorians. She gestured to the bartender on her way past, holding up two fingers until he nodded in agreement. “I figure a drink is the best way to resolve all this mess- you can yell at Brakka to soothe your anger, I get a drink to make up for the one I had to pay the Houk for, we get some excellent company for the evening, it’s a win for everyone.”

And then she was in the middle of the group of Mandalorians, who were just as boisterous and loud as they’d looked from across the bar; they smiled and they cheered and made odd whooping noises as Shae dragged her into the centre of the group, settling down on a lounge that was unpleasantly sticky. Ysaine was grateful for the relative darkness, so that she didn’t have to look at what the source of such gumminess was. 

“Brakka you di’kut, you just about got my new favourite lady friend in trouble,” Shae yelled over the din, making a rude gesture towards the Mandalorian in question; he had a dreadfully bloodied face, presumably from where her elbow had connected with his nose, and he hadn’t really bothered to clean it up at all from the looks of him. 

He put his hands up in an expression of hopelessness, a wretchedly fake look of dismay on his face. “It ain’t my fault I’m surrounded by firebrands and the like,” he shouted, throwing back a single shot that someone shoved into his hand. His eyes were a little glazed when he looked back at them, and Ysaine honestly couldn’t tell if it was from the alcohol or if he was concussed. 

“Everyone! This is my new friend, Ysaine Pierce!” Shae’s voice carried easily over the noise, and Ysaine was then subjected to over a dozen voices hollering her name and shouting various greetings at her, some of which weren’t even in Basic. A drink was slammed down onto the table in front of her by someone, she didn’t see who, and then Shae was listing off names faster than she could follow. 

“That’s Rhaas, and that’s Lusi, and that’s Jos and Valk- they’re a pair, you don’t separate them.” Ysaine couldn’t even keep track of who she was pointing to, and the small sip of alcohol she’d had was making her light-headed already. “Brakka you’ve already met, kaysh mirsh solus, he’s a waste of space-”

“I heard that, Vizla!”

“Udesii, usenye!” She half rose up off the couch, making lewd gestures with her blaster that made Ysaine blush and stare down into her lap. Shae patted her firmly on the shoulder as she slid back down into the seat beside her, close enough that their knees were touching. “Just ignore him, you’ll be fine. You speak any Mando’a?”

Ysaine shook her head. 

“Shame, sorry, I’ll try to stick to Basic.” She took a swig of her own drink, and Ysaine tried not to notice the way her lips glistened after she put the glass back down. “That’s my older brother, Tam, he’s second in command of the clan after our uncle-”

“You’re an actual proper clan?” Ysaine blurted out, because her head felt like it was spinning a little bit and that seemed better than just sitting there mutely. 

Shae’s laughter was like some sort of intoxicating syrup that soaked into her soul and made her realise how desperately lonely and in need of friendship she’d been up until now. It’d been so isolating living under her stepfather’s rule, and Shae’s immediate offer of company and camaraderie was like stepping out into the sunshine after years of hiding in the dark. 

Ysaine was a little bit smitten with her. 

“Course we’re a proper clan,” she said, pressing her knuckles to her upper arm as if feigning a friendly punch; Ysaine was a little too tipsy to notice she didn’t actually put any pressure in the gesture, and her eyes flickered to the bruises on the exposed parts of her arms as she did it. “We’re as proper as they come-”

Her words lost their sincerity somewhat when Rhaas and Brakka let out a triumphant screech and hurled themselves into the fountain at the base of the immense golden Hutt statue. 

The evening continued on in a similar fashion, with the drinks flowing and the Mandalorians in a state of something that Shae told her was _shereshoy_. “Sort of like, a lust for life?” she said, shouting the words close to her ear. She could feel her breath on her neck, and her hand was on her knee. “You know that feeling?”

Ysaine let out a shaky breath. “Yeah,” she said, closing her eyes as her head spun and the scent of Shae’s body filled her nose. “Yeah, I know that feeling.”

The music was loud and throbbing, and it made her blood pulse in response; the alcohol was making her loose and light headed, and it occurred to her that she probably should have eaten something before trying to drink. Also, she’d never gotten drunk before, but she was fairly certain no one had noticed that. 

Maybe.

It was fine. 

When Shae leaned in a moment later to try to yell something else into her ear, Ysaine turned her head instead, emboldened by the drink and the music and the fact that she wasn’t little Ysaine Pierce here on Nar Shaddaa, sheltered and battered and frightened. Here she could be something else, _someone_ else, and that someone else really, _really_ wanted to forget about everything she’d left behind and kiss a pretty girl.

So she did.

She could tell the gesture caught Shae off guard- she literally felt the soft gasp of surprise against her mouth, and she went to pull away, to apologise and beg her forgiveness. But then Shae’s mouth opened a little more, catching Ysaine’s bottom lip between hers, while her hand slid up the inside of her thigh. 

It should have been humiliating to kiss someone so freely in such a public place, but she felt so desperately, wonderfully alive instead. Her skin was practically crackling with electricity, and she was panting against Shae’s mouth, and she was quite certain she was about to catch fire in at least a half dozen places. 

And then Shae’s hand came to rest between her thighs, and on the unmistakable bulge there, and for a moment Ysaine felt her head simply empty all of coherent thought. No one had ever even come _close_ to touching her like that before, and yet Shae didn’t even hesitate. Was that the sort of thing she should tell her, warn her that she wasn’t some smooth, skilled lover? She tore her mouth away from Shae’s, panic bubbling up inside of her. “I, um, I’m not so good at this,” she stammered, expecting to find a look of at least shock on the Mandalorian woman’s face at the confession. 

Instead, she looked curiously sly, as if she’d just stumbled upon a great treasure she intended to keep secret for herself.

“I like a lady who can be honest with me,” she said huskily, running her hand slowly over the front of her pants. Ysaine saw stars flash in front of her eyes, panting desperately for air as she tried to rub herself against Shae’s touch. “Oh, seems like you like it too, that right?”

She nodded frantically, and when Shae buried a hand in her hair and dragged her down for another kiss, she went willingly.

At some point, Shae took her by the hand and led her away from the bar, to the raucous hoots and cheers of the other Mandalorians. If she hadn’t been so drunk, she might have found it in her to be embarrassed, but she was far too strung out on alcohol and lust and the bewilderingly delightful knowledge that she was going to bed with the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen in her life. 

There was a hallway, she managed to process that much, and a turbolift that had mirrored walls scratched with graffiti along the edges- Shae pressed her up against the wall and kissed her senseless- and then there was a door, and Shae was fumbling around for a pass card-

Somehow, they managed to stumble through the room towards the bed, and Ysaine went toppling over onto her back, laughing giddily as Shae crawled onto the sheets after her. On the mattress, Shae knelt astride her hips, her hands running up her stomach towards the faint peaks of her breasts. 

She looked up at her face, a sly smile on her face- and froze. 

“Hang on a second,” Shae said, sitting back on her calves. She clapped her hands loudly once, and the lights came on in the apartment; Ysaine winced, putting a hand up to shield her eyes from the abrupt brightness. “How old are you?”

Ysaine felt her face flush. “I- I’m twenty-two,” she said, trying to make the lie sound convincing. 

“Uh huh,” Shae said wryly, sounding not at all convinced. “Are we counting using Chiss years or something?”

“Uhhh...”

“Wanna try again?”

“I’m twenty?”

Shae grinned. “You’re such a terrible fucking liar- what are you, like, seventeen?”

Ysaine felt her stomach drop, and tried not to cringe waiting for the inevitable reprimand. “I... I’m sixteen,” she said quietly, her fingers twisted nervously into the sheets as she waited for Shae to yell. 

Instead she saw Shae’s expression soften, something far more gentle and understanding coming into her eyes than the amused lust that had been there a moment before. “That the real one?” she asked, and when Ysaine nodded, blinking back tears, she sighed. “Haar’chak, you should’ve said something, I’m not gonna fuck around with a scared kid-”

“I’m not a kid!” 

Shae looked at her pointedly, sliding off of her lap and settling down beside her on the bed. “You’re scared, and the vibes I’m getting from you tell me that you haven’t ever fucked around before, and fuck, you’re only sixteen _and_ you’re drunk. I’m not gonna take advantage of you like that.”

Ysaine felt the first tear slip down onto her cheek, and she tried to smear it away awkwardly. “I’m not a kid,” she repeated, because what else could she say to that?

“Yeah, well, you fooled me for half an hour- you looked older down in the bar, with the bad lighting and all.”

For some reason, Ysaine felt defensive. “Well, how old are _you_ , then?” she asked defiantly. 

Shae chuckled. “Old enough to get drunk and fuck around, if that’s what you’re asking.” At Ysaine’s withering look, she said “Okay fine, I’m twenty-one. You happy?”

“ _No_ ,” Ysaine said petulantly.

Shae laughed again, gentler this time. “Come on, don’t be like that. What the fuck are you doing running around on Nar Shaddaa by yourself anyway? I figured, given how quick you got yourself into a fight back at the bar, that the bruises were just you brawling.” She put a hand under her chin and turned her to face her. “Someone hurt you? On purpose?”

Ysaine tried to stare angrily at her, but her trembling chin gave her away, and she looked down before she had to see the look on Shae’s face at her blubbering. “It was Ma’s husband,” she said, the first time she’d let herself say it out loud. “He was- I had to stop him. After Ma died, it was too much. He was hurting Gabby too.”

“Gabby?”

“Gabriel. My brother. He’s only a kid, see.” She took a shuddering breath. “I didn’t want him growing up the way I did.” 

Shae reached out and cupped her cheek, looking at her gently; it sent a shiver through her. “What?” Ysaine asked, squirming under that gaze.

She laughed softly. “Mando’ad draar digu,” she said, her thumb tracing over her skin, just beneath her eye.

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘ _a Mandalorian never forgets_ ’,” she said. “And I won’t forget what you’ve told me, or the honour you did me tonight when you wanted to intervene between me and Brakka. You’ve got courage to put half of Mandalore to shame.”

Ysaine stared at her, the tears burning in her eyes. “Now how’s a girl not supposed to fall a little bit in love when you say something like that,” she said hoarsely, a tear slithering onto her cheek. Shae’s thumb brushed it away gently, as if it wasn’t a big deal at all. 

Shae’s smile was gentle. “I know, I know, I’m irresistible,” she said. “But sometimes I like to pretend I’m a decent sort, and a decent sort doesn’t fuck underage teenage runaways.” Ysaine scowled through the tears and opened her mouth to respond, but Shae moved her hand to press a finger to her lips. “Uh uh, none of that. You’re hurt and miserable, and drunk. Not happening.”

“So you’re just gonna throw me out, I guess?”

“I really have to wonder about that stepfather of yours, if you think that’s a logical progression of events.” Shae ran her hand up to the side of her face, running her fingers through the tangles of her hair where it had come loose in their fumblings. “Look, Ysaine, you’re a nice kid, but I’m not gonna fuck you. You can sleep here tonight, and in the morning we’ll see what we can do for you.”

Ysaine swallowed nervously, sniffing to try and avoid further tears. “Like... like what?”

“How good are you with your hands?”


	2. Chapter 2

_Nar Shaddaa, Red Light Sector, The 14th Year of the Great Galactic War_

“Did I tell you, Izzy,” Braden slurred heavily, “did I tell, Izzy, Ysaine do you know, did I-”

“Did you tell me what, Braden,” Ysaine asked patiently, if somewhat absently, as she worked to patch up the number a rival had done on his shoulder. It was a wonder he’d still been conscious when he’d staggered in the door to the clinic, given how much blood he’d lost in what she couldn’t quite tell whether it was knife wounds or the bite marks of some enormously oversized critter. This was Nar Shaddaa, after all, and this was Braden- he was just dumb enough to want to fight something big and mean for money, and Nar Shaddaa had all kinds of big and mean things hiding in private fighting dens. Every time she got one wound closed, she found another hiding in the bloodied ruins of his upper back. “Is it gonna be something helpful, like what happened to you? Or is it just more bullshit again about fancy jobs you like to pretend you’ve pulled?”

“No, shh, Izzy, lemme... lemme tell you, I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what, Braden?”

He swung his gaze around to her face, his eyes unfocused and a dribble of blood running from his nose. “‘m gonna win the Great Hunt,” he whispered loudly, as if it were some grand secret.

In the year she’d been working at the clinic, it was the fourth time he’d told her.

“Oh yeah? Ain’t all your fancy jobs mostly for the Pubs?” She held a sedative needle between her teeth for a moment, while she wiped away the copious amounts of excess blood on her hands that was making it difficult to hold onto things. “If you try out for the Great Hunt, I can’t see your bosses taking too kindly to Mando sympathies.”

“Who needs Pubs?” he asked, throwing his arms up in some kind of drunken euphoric outrage; the exaggerated motion promptly tore open several of his stitches, and Ysaine swore. “I’ll be richer’n... all the Pubs! I will be the Great Hunter, the great... greater.”

“I really don’t want to tranq you given how much blood you’ve lost, you asshole, but if you don’t hold still I’m going to do just that.” He slumped towards her, and she only just managed to catch him from slithering off the bed altogether. “Braden, you di’kut, for fuck’s sake-”

“Is there a problem in there, Izzy?” 

She glanced over her shoulder to see the owner of the establishment leaning around the doorframe. “It’s all good, Doctor,” she said, giving the diminutive woman an awkward thumbs up as she struggled to keep Braden from lolling onto the floor. 

Doctor Elspeth Cordovich was a tiny little woman as fierce as she was small- Ysaine suspected that her shortness had simply condensed and intensified the levels of intimidation a regular person could be expected to contain. She’d run an all-purpose clinic in the lower levels of the entertainment sector for years now, at least as long as the war, apparently; no one seemed to know where she’d come from, only that one day she’d turned up on the Smuggler’s Moon with her twi’lek wife and set up shop in an empty storefront. 

A year ago now, Shae had introduced her to the doctor, knowing the clinic was in dire need of a nurse, and despite Ysaine’s stunned and rather weak protestations that she knew nothing about medicine at all, it had become abundantly clear that the handful of staff were struggling with the workload. Elspeth had taken one look at her and asked her how long she’d been making do with half doses of hormones, and she’d promptly fallen in love with her. 

A lot of the work was pretty basic, to be honest, and not at all as complicated as she’d assumed it would be- given their location, most of the folk they saw were drunk, or high on illegal stims, or had found themselves on the wrong end of a gang member’s shiv. It was easy enough to check the drunks for alcohol poisoning and leave them in a dark cubicle to sober up, to run a blood check on the junkies to make sure they hadn’t injected some toxic sludge into their veins, to issue a tired and familiar reminder to the idiots who’d been in fights while she smeared kolto on the wounds and scanned for internal bleeding. 

She’d broken up scuffles, treated rival gang members at the same time while bodily holding them apart, learned to tell the difference between a regular drunk and someone with a concussion- all in all, she was quite proud of herself. Elspeth couldn’t exactly give her the most outstanding of wages, but she was allowed to sleep in a spare storeroom, and she never went without her hormones, and more than that she was _safe_. Even surrounded by thugs and gang members and criminals, she felt far safer than she ever had in New Adasta, in her stepfather’s apartment.

So when Elspeth nodded approvingly and moved on to other concerns, Ysaine couldn’t help but feel a swell of pride. 

Which was deflated slightly when she lost her grip on Braden, and he fell against her heavily, hard enough to bruise her shin. She spat a string of curses in a variety of languages, heaving him back onto the medical gurney with difficulty as he mumbled incoherently. 

“I hope the prize money was worth it, you jackass,” she muttered, trying to wipe her hands off on her pants and scowling when she found them just as blood-soaked as her arms. “Because now you’re gonna be spending it repaying us for wasting our shit keeping you alive.” 

Satisfied that he wasn’t going to make another attempt for the floor again, she went over to the hygiene station and nudged the hydrospray with her elbow, sighing with relief as she held her soiled hands under the stinging spray to clean them. Glancing at the open door, she shucked off her scrubs and tossed them into a hazards bag by the far wall, dunking herself under the water only long enough to wash the rest of the blood away. 

“I’m sure I’ve seen a porno start this way,” came a familiar voice from the doorway.

Glancing over her shoulder, Ysaine laughed when she saw Shae leaning against the doorframe, her stomach squirming despite her efforts to keep herself together. “If you call me a Naughty Nurse I will actually punch you,” she said, switching the spray off and shuffling awkwardly across the tiled floor to a wall cabinet to fish out another pair of scrubs. She tugged them on over her wet undergarments, not bothering to towel herself off. “I get enough of that shit from the niktos.”

Shae laughed as well, pushing off the door and sauntering into the room. “Aw, what’s the problem babe, the facial ridges don’t do it for you?”

Her medical slippers squelched as she walked, but she didn’t have a fresh pair she could change in to for those. “Call me old-fashioned, but I’m just not interested in fucking something that wouldn’t be out of place in a terrarium.”

“Oooh, look at you with your fancy words,” Shae said, arms crossed as she came to a stop beside the table. Braden was snoring, of all things, completely oblivious to their conversation. “Got yourself a fancy job and all, now you’re moving up in the world?”

Ysaine snorted. “Hardly,” she said wryly, deftly stripping away the last ragged strips that remained of Braden’s jacket and tossing them on the floor, swabbing his exposed back with a kolto wipe to clear away the excess blood. “This ain’t exactly high glamour right here.”

“I dunno, I saw something in the triage out front that looked like a cross between a chiss and a trandoshan, so I dunno if someone got drunk and fucked something they shouldn’t’ve and made an ugly fucking baby, or if there’s some weird new critter out there I don’t wanna meet.”

“I wouldn’t put safe money on either,” Ysaine said absently, “because it could very easily be either.” 

Shae’s cackling laugh made her grin, and she glanced up at her. “What’re you doing back on Nar Shaddaa, anyway?” she asked. “Last I heard, you were all off causing mischief in the Mid Rim.” 

“You shouldn’t listen to gossip, young lady, you should know that.”

There was a loud crunching noise in the front room, like furniture being abruptly flattened, and then a moment later a loud bellow that was cut off by the sound of flesh striking flesh.

And then- “ _Gentlemen_ , need I remind you this is a neutral sanctuary?” Elspeth roared, her voice echoing down the corridor with enough venom to make Ysaine wince as she went back to her work. “If you are so determined to continue with your brainless violence, you are quite welcome to do so outside, but I will _not_ tolerate it in here.”

Shae winced sympathetically. “Ouch,” she said, and Ysaine held up a finger in warning.

“Wait for it...”

“No, Garrough, I don’t care who started it, and if you take a single step outside of my door with the intention of continuing such inanity, you will not be welcome in my establishment again. So you can swallow your pride and sit there until we call you, or you can go outside and enjoy the two minutes of vanity your ego allows you before you bleed to death from your injuries.” 

Heavy silence hung in the front room, intensely uncomfortable, and after a moment there was the almost sullen sound of furniture being righted and the mutters of a half dozen different languages as people picked up where they’d been before they’d been interrupted by the brawl. 

“Don’t think I’ve ever heard Elsie shout before,” Shae said. 

With Braden out like a light, it was easier for Ysaine to make some headway on his wounds. “She’ll shout if she hears you call her Elsie, for sure,” she said, prodding at one of the incisions that felt unusually lumpy. Grabbing a pair of surgical tweezers off the tray beside the gurney, she dug into the wound, grimacing when she pulled out a shard of something metallic. 

“Nah, she loves me. I got her her best nurse, after all.”

Ysaine cast her a wry look. “Charm will only get you so far, madam,” she said, smearing kolto gel over the open wounds and turning to rummage around in the cold box behind her for a plasma bag in Braden’s blood type. Shae politely held the loose end of the tubing for her as she wrestled the IV stand into place; getting Braden’s arm at an angle that the needle would sit comfortably was hard, what with the big lout being slouched so badly on his stomach, but she managed in the end. 

“Look at you,” Shae said, something oddly pleased in her tone as she watched her. “A year ago you were jumping at shadows and trying to fight things twice as big as you. Now you’re all sensible and shit.” 

Ysaine felt her cheeks warming at the compliment. “You never did say what you were doing slumming it around here again,” she said, casually diverting the conversation. 

Shae laughed. “Subtle, Pierce,” she said, amused. “Since you’re so curious, Tam and Uncle Grieg are meeting with some Imps, about a job offer.”

“For the whole clan?” At Shae’s nod, Ysaine whistled softly. “That’s gotta be a generous offer, then.”

“Mmm, eyeing me off for my money now, are we Pierce?”

“What? No, I wouldn’t- no, I don’t!”

Shae’s delighted cackle made her face burn furiously. “Aw, don’t want me as your sugar-momma, Izzy? I’m hurt.” 

“You’re only five years older than me, you di’kut.” 

“Ooh, your pronunciation is fucking awful,” Shae said with a wince. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing better with that, exposed to all qualities of life and all?” 

“Well, maybe if the Mandos I wanted to spend time with were around more often, I’d be doing better with my accent, wouldn’t I?” The burst of courage was enough to get the words out, but she could feel her skin prickling the longer Shae stared at her in silence, her smile growing more and more wickedly delighted. 

“Ysaine Pierce,” she said slowly, the way she drawled her name enough to make a shiver run down her spine, “are you propositioning me over the back of this bloodied, unconscious gentleman?” 

Ysaine swallowed nervously. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten ideas while we’ve got a man between us,” she said, and then immediately wished she could take back the words. “Fuck, I mean-”

“You mean you’ve thought about a threesome with me and some mysterious, handsome man,” Shae said gleefully. “I’m touched.” 

Someone cleared their throat in the doorway behind them, and Ysaine glanced over Shae’s shoulder to see a tall, willowy twi’lek woman with dusky pink skin and an unreadable expression on her face standing and watching them. “Miss Vizla,” she said politely, as if she hadn’t just walked in on the two of them talking about threesomes, “Elspeth would like me to ask whether you had any luck procuring the autoimmune regulators she was looking for?” 

“Of course ma’am,” Shae said, all sunny smiles and professionalism as she turned to face her. “The boys are unloading our cargo right now, we had a couple of other... _jobs_ , that needed to be turned in first.” She didn’t need to elaborate for either of them to know that the jobs had most likely been bounties, either living or dead. “We’ll see it get dropped off safe and sound later tonight.”

She nodded briefly in her direction. “Much obliged,” she said, her tone mild and her expression bland as she turned and glided out of sight. 

“She ever emote at all?” Shae asked once she was safely out of hearing.

Ysaine shook her head. “Not that I’ve ever seen. But Elspeth dotes on her, and they seem happy.”

“Takes all kinds, I guess,” Shae said with a shrug. She glanced back at her, a calculating gleam in her eyes. “Speaking of...”

She gestured pointedly to Braden. “I’m sort of working right now.” 

Shae made a rude noise. “Work, work, work. I haven’t seen you in months and all you wanna do is lovingly stroke some asshole’s back?”

“‘m gonna hunt,” Braden slurred weakly.

“What’d he say?”

“He said he’s going to win the Great Hunt,” Ysaine deadpanned. “He promised me that this time he means it.”

“Oh,” Shae said, nodding as if this were the most normal announcement in the world, “well, he’s not off to a great start.”

“No shit.”

Shae meandered around the table, something about the way she moved her hips drawing in Ysaine’s gaze no matter how much she tried to resist. “You should come out for drinks,” Shae said, running a finger absently over the curve of her bicep where the damp fabric of the scrubs clung to it. “You owe me one, after all.”

“I owe Elspeth a full shift.”

“Mmm, but who got you this job?” Shae kept running her fingers lightly over her arm, just enough to raise goosebumps on the chilled skin. “Come on, Elsie gets it. Plus she’ll be in a good mood because I just brought her in a whole bunch of medical supplies.”

When Ysaine didn’t answer, she tried pouting. “Come _on_ ,” she drawled plaintively, dragging the single syllable out for at least eight. “Come get a drink with me.” 

Ysaine felt her determination crumbling. “And you’re not gonna make a habit of dragging me out of work and getting me in trouble with Elspeth?”

Shae’s grin was utterly wicked. “On my honour as a Mandalorian,” she said slyly. 

She was right, in the end- Elspeth was more than happy to let her off early, once she’d cleaned up the mess Braden had made and left him to sleep it off. He probably could’ve done with a night in a kolto tank, but that was the sort of luxury a free emergency clinic in gang territory couldn’t really afford. He’d have some good scars come the morning at least, something to show off to the gender of his choice when trying to impress potential lovers. 

Either that, or she’d be able to point to them next time he shuffled through the door a bloodied mess and say ‘ _I fucking told you so_ ’. That was satisfying. 

Shae was sitting on the counter when she made her way back out to the reception area, the floor only partially soiled with blood splatters of at least three different colours; Devalla, their intake nurse, was seated at the counter and rather pointedly browsing through a picture gallery on the holonet that appeared to be all rather erotic depictions of a Mirialan actor she recognised from some famous detective holodrama. 

“Enjoying yourself, Dev?”

“It’s research,” Dev said instantly, not even flinching at having been caught. “Brushing up on my anatomical studies.” 

Shae leaned back on her elbows and squinted at the display. “Come on, that’s not even _possible_ in humanoid species,” she said, pointing to one picture in particular that Ysaine rather quickly looked away from in mild horror. 

“It’s good to be prepared for all possibilities,” Dev said mildly. “Hence why I’m studying.”

Ysaine grabbed her jacket out from behind the counter, and Shae levered herself onto the floor, stretching her arms up over her head. Ysaine was distracted for a moment by the way the armour plating clung to her thighs, and the way the high-weave mesh of her under-armour fitted so tightly against her ass. 

It occurred to her that she might just have a wee bit of a thing for Mandos in their armour. 

“You wanna go out dressed like that?” she asked, offering Shae her arm; Shae executed an exaggerated curtsy and took the proffered escort, chuckling under her breath. “What?”

“You so keen to get me out of my clothes, huh Pierce?”

Behind them, Dev snorted, and Ysaine felt her face burning yet again. “I- no! That’s not, I just meant-”

“I know what you meant,” Shae said, with a wicked grin and a wink that went straight to her loins. “You’re just so fun to tease.” 

The Red Light Sector was littered with clubs and nightspots and raves, some of them actually legal establishments and everything; Shae led her to one with dark walls and ultraviolet lights, the orange in her lipstick glowing under the purple as she led her through the crowded dance floor. There was some kind of music playing with a throbbing beat- if she had to guess, she’d probably say it was some sort of zabrak trance, the bass hammering wildly through her feet and making her rib cage rattle along with it. The DJ was wearing a helmet, so she couldn’t exactly tell if their species was somewhat informative of their genre choices. 

Shae dragged her up to the bar, gesturing to the bartender and shouting for two of something; the small glass was pressed into her hand, and Ysaine didn’t hesitate as she threw it back.

She did, however, regret it about two seconds after. 

By some miracle, she didn’t spit it up all over the bar, but by the look on Shae’s face, she’d been completely expecting her to. “It’s a Mando drink,” she yelled over the music. “The look on your face was priceless.”

Ysaine threw her a withering look. “I’m bigger than you, Vizla,” she said pointedly, “I can soak up more alcohol than you before it hits me.”

“Is that a challenge, Pierce?”

“Up to you, little woman.”

Shae made a mock face of scandalous outrage, but her eyes shone with mischievous delight. “You’re on, naughty nurse.”

They scored themselves two bar stools close to the wall, away from the worst of the crush, and they settled in to laugh and drink and catch up on the few months since they’d last seen each other. “The implant’s new,” Shae said, gesturing to her forehead in case she couldn’t hear her over the music. “Got any more I should know about?”

Her meaning was obvious, and Ysaine laughed, shaking her head. “Just the one so far,” she said. “It regulates my hormones, no more fucking around with giant needles. Doc says she can speak to a tech expert later down the track about doing further upgrades, if I want ‘em.”

“You happy with it?”

“So fucking happy, I hate needles.”

“You got into the wrong line of work then.”

“Yeah, well, this pretty girl talked it up and I was a bit too distracted by her face to realise what I was getting into at the time.”

Shae clinked her glass against hers. “Smooth, Pierce.”

The evening degenerated from there, with more alcohol and hands that became more familiar the more drinks they’d have. It came to a point where Shae was leaning in close to her, toying with the haircut that was different to how she’d last seen it.

“I like this,” she said, running her hand over the fuzzy shaved sides of her head, playing with the soft hair close to the skull. “Feels nice.”

Ysaine thought it felt nice too. “Had to shave it all off when I got the implants,” she said, her voice only slightly slurred by the drink. “Then I had to keep the sides short for check-ups in the first few months. Then I thought I liked it.”

“I like it too,” Shae repeated, and it occurred to her that she sounded a little drunk as well. For some reason that made her giggle, and then Shae giggled too, and then they were leaning against each other howling with laughter. From there, it just sort of naturally bled into kissing, teeth and tongues and the hot spice of the alcohol on each other’s breath; Shae kissed her like she wanted to devour her, and it left her just as dizzy as last time. 

There was no one seated on either side of them at the bar, for which Ysaine was absurdly grateful for given what she was about to do; she pulled Shae off of her stool and onto her lap, grinning at the way she cackled drunkenly and squirmed around on top of her as she let her mouth and her teeth drift down to her neck.

“You ticklish, Vizla?” she asked, sucking on the lobe of her ear while she shrieked and squirmed. A few folk threw looks in their direction, and if the music hadn’t been so loud, they probably would’ve had the whole bar staring at them; as it was, in a seedy club in the Red Light sector, this was nothing out of the ordinary. 

“You fucking tease, Pierce, _fuck_.” Shae had a hand fisted in her hair, fierce enough for the tug to hurt just ever so slightly, and she pulled her to face her. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you this past year, but you’re still young-”

“I’m not a kid, Shae,” Ysaine said, kissing her aggressively. The protective plating of her armour was stabbing into her uncomfortably in more than a few places, but she could deal with that. “I’m not a drunk, beat-up runaway now, and I know what I want.”

“Oh, yeah?” Shae gasped when she bit her lip, the sound trailing off deliciously. “And what would that be?”

“ _You_.”

They didn’t spend much longer at the bar, paying their tab and stumbling out together in a drunken jumble of limbs and giggles and kisses. There were walls to stop and kiss up against, filthy graffiti covered walls that some drunk had probably pissed on at some point if she was honest, but they were drunk and they were hungry for one another and they hadn’t really gotten as far as discussing where it was they were supposed to be going. All Ysaine knew was that she wanted to get in real close to Shae, skin to skin, and she wanted to taste the salt in her sweat. 

“Where’d you-?”

Shae had her up against a lamp post, the glaring neon of a nearby club flicking over their skin in a wash of colours. “I’ve got a room,” she panted, fishing out the sort of cheap keycard you got from an equally cheap motel. 

“Great answer.”

Shae grinned, running her hand over her stomach and chuckling huskily when Ysaine groaned and tipped her head back against the pole. “What, were you thinking you’d just take me back to that little store-room you call home and do me on top of a crate of adrenals?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

It took them a good fifteen minutes of drunken stumbling to make their way through the sector to the motel where Shae had bought a room for the night; it was tidy, at least, and it wasn’t bedecked in neon, so that had to say something about it. The desk in reception was manned by a huge Gamorrean woman, who grunted piggishly when they staggered through the door, her tiny eyes watching them as they made their way to the stairs, laughing the whole way.

Ysaine pinned her to the wall of the stairwell about halfway up, breathless and trembling and laughing. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” she said, leaving dark bite marks on Shae’s neck in between each word. 

Her laughter was more intoxicating than anything she’d drunk down in the bar. “Well, stop thinking and let’s start acting on those thoughts, yeah?”

The room was simple enough, the sort of fare you’d expect in a cheap motel in the entertainment sector of a place like Nar Shaddaa. A bed, a desk, a ‘fresher that had a few rust stains along the floor. The bed was of most interest to Ysaine as they fumbled their way through the door, trying to nudge it shut behind them with her foot. “How the fuck does this armour come off?” she gasped, digging her fingers in to what she’d thought were the clasps but were proving extraordinarily resilient. 

“Does a lady gotta do everything herself?”

“Get your fucking armour off now so you can wrap your thighs around my head, or so help me-”

Shae’s tremulous shudder somewhat undermined the wicked look on her face. “And they say romance is dead,” she murmured, working quickly to shuck the armour, leaving it where it fell on the ground on their way towards the bed. Ysaine in turn tried to wrestle her way out of her own clothing, and she was halfway out of her shirt when she felt Shae’s mouth pressing open mouthed kisses against her stomach, and the noise she let out was, quite frankly, embarrassing. 

“You’re trembling,” Shae whispered, tracing her tongue over her skin as she pulled her to stand between her legs. 

“Too much to drink,” Ysaine said hoarsely, running her fingers into Shae’s hair and trying to convince her body to cooperate so that she didn’t come immediately. 

“Mmhmm, sure.” Shae reached up, wrapping her hands around to the small of her back and tugging her forward as she fell back onto the mattress. Ysaine landed heavily atop her, her skin sparking with electricity where it met hers. 

Fuck, but it was everything she’d wanted and more. 

Shae was patient with her when she was clumsy, and she went slow while trying to work out what worked for her; for all her bravado, and for all the porn she’d secretly watched this last year, trying to convince herself to be more confident about sex and her body in general, she really wasn’t sure what worked for her. Luckily enough, Shae seemed to take that as a challenge, delighting in cataloguing each and every reaction she made to the touch of her hands and her mouth.

 _Oh_ , her mouth. She really liked it when she used her mouth. When she did come- far too quickly, honestly- it was with Shae’s mouth around her, and the taste of her own pleasure still on her lips. 

And then, sweaty and tangled in the sheets and in one another, they lay there in silence, trying to catch their breath and waiting for the rapid pulse of their heartbeats to settle again.

Shae’s hair looked like melted cooper against the pillows, like the way the sun turned red through the atmosphere of Nar Shaddaa, in the late afternoon. “It’s Alderaan,” she said quietly, tracing patterns gently over Ysaine’s skin with the very tip of her finger. “The job is Alderaan.”

Ysaine was sluggish with the afterglow, and it took her a second to turn it over in her head into something coherent. “What, like, the whole planet,” she mumbled, playing with her hair and twining it around her finger. 

Her laugh was soft, sated. “Yeah, like the whole planet,” she said. “There’s stuff I can’t talk about, and you can’t tell anyone about it either, but... yeah. Alderaan. It’s what Grieg and Tam met with the Imps about.”

“Are you going?” Ysaine said, sliding one hand around Shae’s hip and tugging her a little closer. 

“Yeah, I am.” She didn’t even hesitate. “It’s good money, and Alderaan has lots of ties to the Jedi- ‘s good bragging rights, killing a Jedi.” 

Ysaine took it in slowly, the idea that Shae was willingly going to war for money and glory, to fight against opponents so powerfully terrifying that Ysaine couldn’t even begin to imagine it. There was a Jedi enclave here on Nar Shaddaa, but she didn’t even want to go near it; likewise, she’d seen one or two patients in the clinic over the last year who’d come off a bad encounter with a sith, and she never wanted to come in contact with one of them either. 

She dug her fingers in slightly to her hip. “Don’t die,” she said quietly. 

Shae made a noise of amused contentment. “Don’t go getting all sentimental on me or anything, Pierce,” she said.


	3. Chapter 3

_Dromund Kaas, Kaas City, The 17th Year of the Great Galactic War_

Ysaine hated Dromund Kaas- and that was really saying something, given the years she’d spent on that fetid cesspit known as Nar Shaddaa that the Hutts tried to pass off as a polished turd. 

The humidity wasn’t the worst thing imaginable, Nar Shaddaa had a tendency to get hot and clammy a lot of days; too many people and too much machinery and not enough room to breathe, it wasn’t surprising. But with Dromund Kaas, it wasn’t crowded. There was plenty of room to move, to breathe. It was just the planet determined to be as unpleasant as possible, some kind of physical manifestation of the temper tantrums of the sith themselves. 

Seeing steam rise from the promenades after the short, intense bursts of rain was amusing the first five or six times, not so much when it was a constant cycle going all day of every day. She felt damp, like there was never a time when she’d been dry and her clothes hadn’t been unpleasant to wear, like she’d just always existed in this sticky, moist hellscape.

Plus, there were sith. Fucking _stars_ , there were so many sith, and fuck if she didn’t want to just turn and walk quickly in the other direction every time she saw one of those creepy fuckers sauntering around in public. Ziost, at least, had been a mostly civilian world, built on efficiency and logistics and the severity of it all didn’t tend to appeal to the sith folk and their penchant for the dramatic. What few sith had made the planet their home hadn’t ever bothered with the civilian housing sectors that Ysaine had grown up in. 

She hated sith. Granted, she’d only been in Kaas City for a few weeks, and you didn’t really make a point of advertising those sorts of views unless you had a death wish, but she hated sith. Overpowered, egotistical, inhuman sadists, the lot of them- clearly there was something about the Force that made folk go peculiar, because she hadn’t seen a fucking sane one among them so far. 

Beyond the safety of the overhang she was standing under, the rain pelted down in a veritable torrent; there was no wind, just droplets so heavy and so fat that they felt like rubber bullets slamming into you if you were stupid enough to get caught out in it. She’d learned that the hard way. Somewhere in the distance, a rumble of thunder echoed through the jagged, jungle covered hills, the constant flashes of lightning leaving the day well illuminated despite the dark clouds. 

Around her, the regular folk of Dromund Kaas were going about their days, unperturbed by the weather and the presence of the psychotic wizards in their midst. The building at her back was a seething hive of very formal, civilised activity, and the sterility with which they went about their work made something dark and ugly settle in her gut. 

They hadn’t thrown her out, precisely, but the Imperial Citizenship Bureau had certainly made it very clear that they wouldn’t be happy to see her again anytime soon. Granted, she’d gone in under a fake name, so if she gave it enough time and bought herself another forged identity, she could probably give it another shot. 

But it had taken her four years of ruthless scrimping and saving just to get this far, hoarding every single credit she’d earned at the clinic to get here, only for the rug to be pulled out from under her. 

_The nameless bureaucrat had squinted at her over the top of their desk terminal, as if trying to see through her. “And how did you say you were related to the child?” they’d said._

_“He’s my nephew,” she’d said easily, almost effortlessly casual with the lie despite how twisted up inside she was. “His ma was my sister.”_

_“We have no record of a sister for Constance Pierce.”_

_“Wasn’t born in Imp space,” she’d said. Luckily she knew enough about her grandparents that it wasn’t something she had to lie about. “When the folks moved back home Connie went with ‘em, I stayed in the Outer Rim, trying my luck on a business venture. Didn’t work out, so I came home.”_

_They’d stared at her, and she could tell they knew she was lying, but couldn’t prove it. “And you did not feel the need to return home for the death of your sister, or the disappearance of your niece?”_

_Disappearance was good. It was better than sentences involving fugitive, criminal or escapee. “Who was gonna message me to tell me?” she’d drawled, staring back just as pointedly. “You guys don’t have a record for me, Connie’s dead and Izzy’s gone, so who was gonna comm me to tell me to come back?”_

_“Hmph.” Rude ass fucker didn’t even have the decency to apologise to her. “As it stands, your request for custody of your nephew, Gabriel Pierce, has been rejected at this time.”_

_It’d taken everything she had to stop herself from launching herself over the desk and throttling them. “What? Why? What the fuck for?”_

_“That language is hardly necessary-”_

_“I filled out all your fucking mindless forms,” she’d said, her voice rising towards a shout, “and I paid all the fucking fees, so what the fuck is the problem?”_

_“Miss Pierce, if you do not lower your voice and converse in a more civilized manner, I will have you escorted from the building by security.”_

_“It’ll be a far sight better than you, because they’ll be picking you up with tweezers by the time I’m done with you-”_

_“Miss Pierce!”_

_“Tell me where Gabby is!”_

_“Your nephew is no longer in the custody of the New Adasta Department of Child Services,” they’d said, stammering slightly. “After the loss of his guardians, he was taken in by the Department for evaluation and reassignment to a foster home.”_

_Ysaine’s nostrils had flared from the anger she was withholding. “Well, take him out of the foster home, because he’s coming with me.”_

_“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”_

_“Why the fuck not?”_

_“Because Gabriel disappeared from the custody of his guardians a little over a year ago,” they’d said, and Ysaine had felt her entire world upend itself. “He had attempted to run away numerous times prior to that, so the custodial officer assigned to the case declared him an unauthorized delinquent and closed the file.”_

_“Unauthorized- he’s a child! He’s not even eight!”_

_“Regardless, he is an Imperial citizen, and in a time of war we do not have the funding or the resources to waste them in pursuit of a single wayward urchin. Such actions on his part show a callous disrespect for the Empire-”_

_“He’s a child, you fucking asshole!”_

_“Miss Pierce, if you do not retake your seat, I shall have you removed.”_

Needless to say, she hadn’t retaken her seat. And now she was leaning up against the side of the building, watching the rain thunder down three feet in front of her, feeling the mist from the spray where it hit the ground slowly seeping into her clothes and wondering why she wasn’t crying. 

She’d spent every moment of the last four years waiting for this moment, and now it was broken in a million shards in front of her. She’d just assumed that Gabe would wait, that he’d be quiet and good and subdued and that he’d wait for her, like she’d asked. It’d been years, she realised that, and he’d been so brave- had he kept trying to run away to find her, she wondered? Or was he just so miserably unhappy in the system that a life on the streets had seemed preferable to the bureaucracy of his foster home? 

Of course he’d run. She couldn’t believe she’d been stupid enough to think he wouldn’t. They were far more alike than she would have assumed, even given the huge age gap.

And now she’d spent four years worth of carefully hoarded savings on a trip to Dromund Kaas that was all for nothing. The fake papers, the forged ID card, the necessary bribes to get the file assessed in a more timely fashion, the weeks of accommodation she’d paid for while she’d waited for the agonisingly slow cogs of bureaucracy to turn. All a colossal, humiliating waste, because Gabe was beyond her reach, and short of revealing herself as the prime suspect in a cold case murder, she had no more options right now. Certainly didn’t have the fucking creds for any other options, _fuck_. 

She could, what, go to Ziost and trawl New Adasta block by block, trying to find him in the street gangs that were more secretive than the fucking Intelligence bureau? That wouldn’t look suspicious at all, prodding around looking for a child connected to an old murder; even if nobody suspected her of being some sort of fucking pervert looking to buy kids for her own interests, she’d couldn’t guarantee that her asking questions wouldn’t raise red flags somewhere about her stepfather’s death. 

And then it’d all be for naught, because she’d be arrested after four years on the run, and Gabe would be back in the custody of folks he clearly didn’t like given how relentlessly he’d tried to escape before succeeding, and she would have fucked everything up for both of them. 

Fucking damn it, now she _was_ crying. 

She smeared the back of her hand against her eyes angrily, grateful at least that she’d given up trying to wear makeup in this humidity. Last thing she wanted was to look like a fucking mess in front of these assholes. 

“Get it together, Pierce,” she muttered, sniffling against her sleeve as she watched the rain gradually taper off. In half a minute, the burst would be over again, and the streets would flood with folk looking to take advantage of the brief clear skies until the next shower passed through. “You’re not gonna find him blubbing against a wall on the wrong planet.”

It’d been four years though, and over a year since he’d vanished- what was to say the little shit hadn’t gotten clever and found a way to get himself off Ziost? Or worse, what if he had come down on the wrong side of bad folk, and had been sold, or was being forced to work in a factory, or-

“If, if, if,” she snarled, kicking off from the wall. The rain had petered away to a heavy mist now, and her face was soaked in seconds; she could feel the tepid drops slithering under her clothes and making her shudder, the sensation vastly unpleasant. “What if he’s defected to the Pubs and is their highest ranking general, huh? What if, you dumb panicky fuck?” 

She didn’t even know if she had enough credits to see her back to Nar Shaddaa- she’d gambled everything on this trip, and she hadn’t expected it would take so long, or that things would go so terribly wrong. 

She should’ve just taken him with her, all those years ago, she shouldn’t have risked leaving him. She’d assumed at the time that it was safer for him to stay, because she’d thought there’d be people to take care of him who would actually do the job, not throw their hands up in defeat the moment things got too hard.

_Isn’t that just what you did, though?_

“Fuck off,” she hissed, startling a pair of leather-clad dandies with too many glittery things on their outfits for common sense; given all the lightning that squalled endlessly over the planet, they seemed to be determined to die by electrocution. She scowled at them and they scuttled away, and it was one of the few times she was grateful for her intimidating height. A place like Dromund Kaas, you needed every advantage against potential predators that you could find. 

She was meandering down the promenade rather aimlessly, trying desperately to consider her next move and what the fuck she was supposed to do with her life now, when she caught a flash of familiar blue-grey in the crowd ahead of her; in hindsight, she wasn’t sure why it was enough to make her do a double-take, given that it was hardly a unique colour, and Dromund Kaas was swarming with Mandos given the Empire’s rather aggressive attempts to court the favour of Mandalore these last few years. 

But she saw the blue-grey, and her brain jumped immediately to Shae. 

She hadn’t seen her in nearly a year and a half, not with how popular she was with the Imps for her role in the Alderaan attack. True, they hadn’t won the battle, but it’d led to an ever-growing informal alliance between the Sith and the Mandalorian clans. Hers was a regular name on the holonet news feeds, the sort you saw on propaganda posters, and she’d even seen a few really cringe-worthy adult holovids featuring red-headed bounty hunters who were clearly supposed to be in reference to her. 

The chances of it actually being her, of being here on the street in downtown Kaas City at the exact same time that she was here- well. It wasn’t _impossible_ odds, but she wasn’t sure she would’ve bet on it. Still, she picked up her pace to a jog, dodging in and out of the slower pedestrians, trying to catch up to the familiar figure in foggy blue armour. 

“Shae!” she called, jogging up behind her. “Hey, Vizla!”

She reached out to grab her by the shoulder- and went hurtling backwards from a blow to her stomach. Winded, she didn’t even have time to straighten, because a figure loomed in abruptly on her other side; she clumsily swung a fist in their direction, only registering the sharp lines of a Mandalorian helmet as she blinked to clear her vision of black spots. 

Her punch went wide, and she staggered. Someone grabbed her by the front of her jacket, and then she was staring at her own reflection in the black reflective visor of the helmet. There was a blaster pressed so hard against her throat that it was cutting off her windpipe, and she wheezed and tried to claw at it until one of the others grabbed her wrists and dragged them behind her back. 

After all this, after everything she’d survived and surrounded by fucking sith, she was going to die the old fashioned way, at the end of a blaster. By Mandos. If she wasn’t two seconds away from pissing herself, she probably would have found it hilariously ironic. 

“Udesii ner vod,” came a familiar voice, and she could have wept with relief. She hadn’t made a mistake and accidentally accosted some brutal clan leader she’d never met. She felt the warrior manhandling her hesitate, their grip no longer so sure. 

“A’alor-”

“No buts,” Shae said. Her voice was hard, and far colder than Ysaine had ever heard it. “I said, stand down.”

Neither of the Mandalorians who held her hesitated- the weapons were withdrawn immediately, and they stepped away from Ysaine instantly. “Apologies, Alor’Vizla,” the one who’d held the blaster said. 

“Return to the compound. Inform the clan we leave at first light, weather permitting.”

“Elek, nar’alor.”

Ysaine watched the proceedings in silence, still rattled by the violent response to her approach and even more perturbed by Shae’s less than friendly greeting towards her. And the other two, she hadn’t recognised either of them by their voices- granted, she hadn’t met everyone who pledged to House Vizla, so it was possible she’d just not been introduced to them before, but...

She racked her brain, trying to tease out the translation for what they’d called her. “Arlor? That’s uh... captain?”

Shae finally reached up and disengaged the seals on her helmet, tugging it up and off of her head; her hair fell out in a tumble of burnished bronze, like red fire in the weak afternoon sunlight. But her face... there was something wrong with her eyes. Something cold. 

“Alor,” she corrected. “And your pronunciation is still fucking awful. You alright?” 

“Alor,” she amended, hiding the way her hands shook by tucking them into her pockets. “Yeah, I’ll walk it off... Captain?”

Shae’s smile was more like a grimace. “Chief,” she said. “It means leader, or chief.”

Ysaine felt her stomach fall down into her feet. “Chief,” she repeated, cold horror growing in her belly, “but I thought-”

“Tam’s dead, Pierce,” she said flatly. “A fucking Jedi cut him in half.” 

____

The bar wasn’t busy given that it was the middle of the afternoon, and they managed to snare a table by a window with ease; it was just starting to rain again as they settled in, the water sluicing down the transparisteel in rivers. Shae stared at it, the outside light making patterns on her face with the reflection in the water. Ysaine thought it looked like tears on her cheeks, but she didn’t say that aloud; Shae was so cold, so utterly locked down, that she didn’t really want to press too hard on anything in case it made her lash out. 

She’d learned the hard way from her stepfather, that sometimes folk didn’t need a lot of justification to turn like that; she liked Shae a lot, considered her a... good friend, or something, something awkward she didn’t quite have words for, but that didn’t mean she wanted to push her luck. Old lessons were hard to unlearn, after all. 

And the bruises on her stomach from Shae’s clan members would take a while to ease off. 

“Y’alright?” Shae asked again, holding her drink in her hand and rolling the liquid around in it. She didn’t look like she had much intention to drink it. 

Ysaine offered her a tentative smile. “Bruises fade,” she said with a shrug. 

Shae’s left eye had a twitch beneath it, as if she had flinched slightly but was trying to hide it. “I’m sorry for that,” she said, still staring out the window. “Everyone’s been a little on edge these last few weeks. Losing two chiefs in a year, well...” She shrugged too, an intensely bitter look on her face. “People get jumpy ‘bout strangers on the street getting grabby.” 

“I heard about Grieg,” Ysaine said. “I sent a message to the memorial service.”

“I saw that,” Shae said, a ghost of a smile on her face for a moment. “Tam read it out. It was nice.” 

“Elsie said it was peaceful?”

Shae made a huffing noise that was probably supposed to be a laugh, but seemed remarkably too bitter for such a thing. “Well, yeah, I guess. No Mandalorian wants to die in their bed, though, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a happy death.”

Ysaine looked down to her drink, trying to think of what to say to that. In the distance, the thunder rumbled again, the spark of lightning as it hit the massive conductive rods in the jungle beyond the city enough to significantly brighten the bar for a moment. When she looked up again, blinking the glare out of her eyes, Shae hadn’t moved; there was no indication she’d even looked away when the lightning had struck. 

“So,” she said awkwardly, “what brings you to Kaas?”

Shae finally looked at her, and the blank look in her eyes made her wince. “Had to declare my claim before the enclave,” she said flatly, “and let the Dark Council’s lackeys know I speak for House Vizla now.”

Ysaine shuffled her drink in between her hands, spinning it slowly on the tabletop. “Red tape, huh?” 

She breathed out slowly through her nose, her nostrils flaring slightly. “Yeah. Red tape.” 

This was ridiculous. “Shae, look, you know if you need to talk at all, I’m-”

“I don’t need to _talk_ ,” Shae said loudly, the volume of her words drawing the gaze of a few other patrons towards them. “I need to _act_.”

Ysaine’s heart had lurched with a jolt of adrenalin at the first sign of Shae’s temper, her body trained to recognise a raised voice as a sign of impending and unprovoked violence. Funny- she was usually fine when she was breaking up fights in the clinic, but it was different when it was someone she knew. Clutching the glass tightly in her hands to hide their shaking, she swallowed, trying to keep her voice steady. “I understand you’re hurting, Shae,” she said quietly, “but don’t you _ever_ take that fucking tone with me again, okay?”

Shae's gaze was like flint as she stared at her, and then she shook her head, laughing quietly in disbelief. “Like I’m gonna take advice from some damn hut’uun who runs at the first sign of trouble,” she said mockingly. 

Ysaine reached across the table and slapped her, the sound ringing out loudly enough to have every eye in the place on them. “Don’t you ever fucking presume you know what it cost me to walk out of that apartment,” she hissed, tears gathering in her eyes. “And at least I had the good sense to finish the kill, so that my brother couldn’t be hurt any longer- maybe you could learn from that.”

She climbed to her feet, throwing down one of her precious credits to cover the cost of the drinks, trying to hold it together as she made her way to the door. It hurt more than she wanted to admit when Shae didn’t call her back, or even yell to try and keep the argument going. 

The steam was rising from the pavement again when she got outside, the afternoon muggy and the thunder rumbling ominously across the sky. She stood there, hands on her hips, shaking her head incredulously as something hysterical tried to push its way out of her; there were tears on her face, and she was sort of laughing but sort of gasping, and she was near to vibrating from the adrenalin thrumming through her. 

So that was that. She’d just walked out on the most extraordinary woman she’d ever known, because grieving or not, she wasn’t interested in letting Shae snarl at her the way her stepfather had snarled at Ma. 

“Got anymore fuck ups planned for today, Pierce?” she rasped, crossing her arms over her chest to ignore the shaking; she bowed her head and stalked down the street towards the speeder pad. Not that she could afford to waste credits on a speeder when her legs were perfectly functional, and the bedsit she’d got a tiny broom closet of a room in wasn’t really that far, in the grand scheme of things, so she’d just have to-

“ _Pierce!_ ” 

Her heart lurched up into her throat at the sound of her name, her shoulders going stiff, and after a moment’s hesitation she turned back to face the way she’d just come from. Shae was marching towards her, her helmet tucked under one arm and her pace almost military perfect for how rigid it was; Shae was a woman of easy grace, a violent sort of fluidity that Ysaine had always envied. This wasn’t her at all. 

She came to an abrupt halt before her, her jaw clenched tight and her free hand clenching and unclenching at her side like she was trying to get blood flowing back to the limb. 

Ysaine didn’t respond, simply raising her eyebrows at her as she stared down at her; she had no intention of making this easier for her, whatever _this_ was.

Finally Shae let out a short bark of laughter, the sound tinged with hysteria. A single tear slid onto her cheek, and she brushed it away forcefully. “I watched Tam die, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it,” she said. “He was too far away from me, fighting a Jedi Master by himself- not just a Knight, but a Master- and then I was- I turned around, and he was falling.”

Ysaine didn’t feel like it was necessary for her to interrupt, so she kept her mouth shut. 

“We fell back, and the Jedi manage to get the docking ring locks undone.” Shae was shaking her head over and over again, as if in disbelief. “They got away, the whole envoy, and we were- I had to-”

She took a moment to compose herself, licking her lips slowly as she quite noticeably swallowed several times to control the tears. “I was in charge,” she said with a laugh, shrugging. “I was chief, with a half dozen dead warriors and a failed mission and an angry sith on the comms asking for an update, and all I could think about was getting back on that other ship and just- just taking that Jetii shabuir apart with- with my hands, and laughing in his fucking face when he- when he _begged_ and when all his fine tranquility abandoned him and he was just as mortal and desperate as the rest of us!”

Her voice rose as she spoke, but this time Ysaine didn’t flinch away in an instinctive panic. She kept her arms crossed, weathering the storm of Shae’s grief until it tapered off to a natural break. She stared at her, at her chest heaving and her eyes red rimmed from unshed tears and the grey in her hair that hadn’t been there last time she’d seen her all those months ago. 

“You done?” she asked after a moment, waiting until Shae nodded jerkily. “Okay, well, I’ve got a room across town- it’s nothing fancy, barely big enough to stand up in, but you should come with me.”

Shae’s laugh was shrill. “What, you think a good fuck will clear my thoughts or something, Pierce?”

Ysaine rolled her eyes. “I’m your fucking _friend_ , Vizla,” she said, “not just a convenient dick for when you’re feeling randy. I’m _trying_ to help you.”

She looked like she was going to try and argue, like she was building up to some cutting remark, but then- right there in the middle of the street in downtown Kaas City- she broke. Her face crumbled, and her free hand went up to her mouth to muffle the heart-wrenching sob that escaped from her lips. Her shoulders shook and she bowed her head, the curtain of her hair shielding her face from view as she wept. 

Ysaine sighed tiredly, stepping in close to her and pulling her into her arms. “Hey now,” she murmured, her hands flat against Shae’s back, “can’t have the other clans seeing the arlor of House Vizla carrying on like this, yeah?” She deliberately mispronounced the word as badly as possibly, hoping it’d at least get a laugh. 

She got lucky, hearing a weak chuckle against her chest. “You’re just determined to murder my people’s language, aren’t you Pierce?” Shae said after a moment, the words interspersed with those hiccuping noises that usually came on the tail end of a crying jag. 

“Hey look, I know you Mandos, you’re impressed with killing. I’m just trying to get in good with this fancy chieftain I know.” 

That got another laugh, a little more animated than the first. “You were right to walk,” she said quietly, where she had her face tucked under her chin. “I was a fucking asshole.”

Ysaine swallowed down the first denial that touched her tongue. “Yeah, you were,” she said instead, “but I’m pretty stubborn when I want to be.”

Shae sniffed loudly, and Ysaine tried not to wince at the sound. “I’m glad you are.”

When Ysaine took her hand in hers, she didn’t argue; she did twine her fingers through hers, though, and rested her head against her arm as they walked in silence. If she had any objections to the state of the bedsit when they reached it a half hour later, she didn’t say anything, standing by the door with a bleakly resigned look on her face, as if all the hope and vivacity she’d carried in her when Ysaine had met her years ago had bled away. 

She looked smaller, almost fragile, and Ysaine’s heart broke a little. 

“C’mere,” she murmured, holding her arms open for her. Shae hesitated for a long moment, her expression wounded, before she dropped her helmet on the ground and moved into her embrace. 

She cried, with enough wailing and heart-wrenching weeping that Ysaine had to wonder if she’d allowed herself to cry at all since Tam’s death. Ysaine soothed her quietly, murmuring absently to her as she peeled their clothes and armour away- she was better at dealing with the clasps on Shae’s armour these days- before coaxing her to lie down in the bed with her. Shae clung to her, her face buried against her shoulder as she wept, and Ysaine kissed the top of her head and ran her hands over her back, anchoring her in her grief. 

After a time, Shae finally calmed down, and Ysaine got up to fetch her a glass of water and a couple of myocaine tablets for the inevitable headache, settling back into the bed with her once she was satisfied she’d tended to her appropriately. 

They lay together in silence for a long time, hands slowly running back and forth over one another’s bodies; it wasn’t a sexual moment, far from it given Shae’s grief. It was intimate, and it was life-affirming, a quiet connection between two women reeling back from something dark and painful. 

“What are you doing in Kaas, anyway?” Shae murmured, tracing the line of her collarbone with her finger. 

Ysaine was staring at the roof, and she was glad of it, because she didn’t necessarily want her to see her expression just then. “I was looking for Gabe,” she said softly. 

Shae stopped, and levered herself up onto one elbow, looking down at her; her hair slowly cascaded over her shoulder, cool as it slithered over their skin. “He’s here?” she asked, confused. 

Blinking away tears, Ysaine shook her head. “Had to come to the Citizenship Bureau.”

“You gonna take him in?”

“I was going to.”

Something in her tone must have finally clued her in. “He okay?” she asked quietly. 

Ysaine took a shaky breath. “I dunno,” she whispered. “No one’s seen him in a year.”

Shae watched her closely, her hand resting in the centre of her chest. “I’m sure he’s okay,” she said finally. “He’s your brother, after all.”

“He’s only seven.”

They looked at each other for a long time, legs wrapped together above the sheets; eventually Shae attempted a smile, but it came across more like her lip was trembling from trying not to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. 

Ysaine reached up and cupped her cheek in her hand. “Me too.”


	4. Chapter 4

_Malastare System, Mid Rim, The 21st Year of the Great Galactic War_

Another explosion rocked the ship violently, and Ysaine swore loudly as she went staggering forward, nearly planting face-first into the mess that was Jory’s mangled shoulder. With dark green blood and bits of burned tissues smothered all over her hands, she stumbled over to the wall of the med-bay and smacked the ship’s internal comm unit with her elbow. “It’d be nice if we had a pilot who could _fly_ ,” she yelled, the last word coming out as a snarl. 

“Butcher’s being mouthy again, boss,” came the familiar drawl from the other end, and she could just about hear the grin on the damn Zeltron’s face. 

“Call me butcher again and I _will_ carve you up next time you’re on my table.”

“Ooh, I’m so scared.” The ship jerked again, and she couldn’t tell it was another of the mines colliding with the hull, another missile from their pursuers, or whether Caliah was just flying badly to piss her off more. “A _droid_ could do your job, butcher.”

“A _deactivated_ droid could do your job, you asshole!” she snarled, trying to keep her balance as she wobbled back towards the bed Jory was passed out on. The giant Nikto was too long for the bed, his taloned feet hanging off the end; there was an ugly wound on his shoulder and upper chest, the flesh raw and burned where the gun turret he’d been manning had exploded in his face. 

“Pierce.” Captain Nuaru’s voice boomed over the comms, and she cursed under her breath as she recognised that tone. “I’m gonna need another gunner.”

Rolling her eyes, Ysaine called back “Jory’s a little busy trying not to die right now!” 

“I didn’t mean the Nikto, I meant you.”

This was _not_ happening. “Again, captain, Jory’s a little busy trying not to die and I’m trying to aid that process!”

“Get him stable and get down to the rear turret, Pierce. We’ve got multiple hostiles, so patching him up just as we get blown to bits isn’t gonna help anyone.”

Ysaine made a noise of incoherent frustrated rage, gesticulating wildly to the unconscious Nikto in front of her. “Oh, Ysaine, you’re so smart,” she muttered, rushing to staunch the bleeding- a piece of shrapnel had just missed a major artery in his neck, and it was the hard-plated scales he had in place of skin that had spared him. That and sheer dumb luck. “Let’s sign up for a salvage op! It’s not exactly legal, sure, they have no permits, but it’s money! We love money! And you’ll only be doing patch-ups on the crew, it’s not like you’ll be doing anything dangerous-”

“I can _hear_ you,” Caliah said in a sing-song voice. 

“I am gonna _come up there_ and _cut off_ your _ears!_ ” 

“ _Pierce!_ ” Another barrage rocked the ship, and even Caliah swore this time. “Get on the damn gun!” 

Trying to stop her hands from shaking while she jabbed a kolto stim into an undamaged part of his shoulder, she patted him ineffectively on the chest. “Hold tight, buddy,” she said, “just- keep doing that breathing thing you’re doing, you’ll be fine.”

She wiped her hands clean on her pants as she stalked out into the hallway- well, as clean as they were gonna get given that she’d been all but elbow deep in a Nikto’s shoulder a minute ago-, the metal grating of the gangway clanking under her heavy boots as she raced towards the gunner port. She didn’t bother climbing down the ladder, because her hands were too slippery to get a good grip anyway; instead she slid down, landing heavily in the gunner’s pod and grunting as the impact rattled through her ankles. 

She swung into the turret, the chair bouncing wildly as it settled her weight, and for a moment she felt a lurching sense of vertigo in her stomach at the empty blackness spread out below her feet. Her hands were shaking as she tugged on the headset, priming the quad-laser cannon for engagement. 

“So nice of you to join the game,” Caliah drawled over the headset, the freighter making a hard turn that made the gee forces turn her limbs to duracrete blocks. 

“What, are you jumping at shadows again?” she snapped, pulling herself back upright once the gees had died down. “I can’t see anything-”

“Check your six, Pierce, they’re making another sweep now.”

Her radar started blaring angrily at her, and then two jagged shapes went screeching past her from beneath, the laser fire sparking off the hull on either side of the pod. Swearing liberally, she swung into action, sending a wild spray from the cannons in an effort to deter them, and give her more time to get a targeting lock on them. 

“You drunk, Pierce?” 

She gritted her teeth and followed the path of the fighters, firing in short bursts to force them to keep their distance. “This day would be better if I was!” she shouted. 

They were too far out from Malastare for the Dugs to be sending out their own planetary defence force against a shitbucket freighter like this, so it was likely to be other salvage crews looking to protect their own hauls. The minefield rigged up by the Mandos across the Hydian Way had provided a veritable treasure trove of freighters and passenger liners strewn across multiple sectors, the fools all trying to prove themselves the exception to the rule when it came to navigating through the mines at faster-than-light travel. 

She felt bad for all the lost lives, sure, especially the passenger ships, but this was war. The blockade had a purpose in the grand scheme of things, and she wasn’t gonna argue that. She was far more interested in getting paid and getting out, rather than hurling herself into some bizarre crusade for social awareness about the mortal cost of war. 

Although right now, her chances of getting paid and safely getting out were looking painfully slim. 

“Who’d we piss off, Nuaru?” she asked, swinging around to track the fighters as they came in for another pass. They were smaller than the freighter, designed for an aerial dogfight in ways the shitbucket was not, fast and narrow and with far more powerful weapons installed. Whichever crew had claimed this stretch of the sector, they had money to back up their stake. “This ain’t no regular scavenger crew.” 

“Fucked if I know,” the captain called through the comms; her annoyance was palpable. “I paid Doorune good money for the intel on this spot.”

“Doorune is a con artist,” Caliah drawled, but the strain was beginning to show in his voice. “He can’t even say good morning without lying twice. You should’ve known better than to- _fuck_ these _fucking_ quick little assholes, kriffin’ fuck!” 

The freighter lurched again and Ysaine found herself weightless for a moment as the ship rolled, suddenly staring _up_ into the abyss between the stars instead of peering hesitantly _down_. 

“He probably sold the spot to a dozen crews,” Ysaine said, trying to keep her breakfast in her stomach. “ _Kriff_ , Nuaru, you should’ve _known_ that.” 

“Just because I knew he was running a long con didn’t mean I didn’t think we could get here first!”

One of the fighters went screeching past her, close enough that she could actually make out the faint outline of the pilot in the darkened cockpit- and close enough that she could make out the distinctive and colourful markings on the wings. 

“ _Fuck!_ ”

“Pierce? You hurt?”

“Those are Davaab-type starfighters!” When neither Nuaru or Caliah responded to her revelation, she snarled in frustration. “Mandalorians!” 

“What the fuck are Mandos doing trying to blow us out of the fucking sky?”

“Oh gee, I dunno Nuaru, maybe they think we’re a blockade runner, given that we’re trying to sneak around the minefield?” Another volley went screeching along the side of the ship, and from somewhere behind her she heard the crackle of exploding wires. “Caliah, try to get a commlink with them and don’t stop until they answer!”

“The fuck you think you’re doing, Pierce?”

“Give me access to the comms!” she snarled, hissing a moment later when Caliah connected her and the feedback screeched in her ear. With her hands shaking as she gripped the targeting frame, she said “Ke’pare! Ke’pare, ner vod!”

On the internal comms, she heard Caliah mutter “What the fuck kinda gibberish is that?”

“It’s Mando’a,” she hissed back. “I’m trying to tell them we’re friendly, so don’t let them hear you bitching about their language.”

“I’ll bitch about their gibberish all I want, bunch of unwashed, muscle-bound thugs-”

“Caliah, shut the _fuck up_ and let the lady work!” Nuaru’s voice stunned the Zeltron into silence, and were they not staring death in the face with the next well-aimed laser volley, Ysaine might have cackled delightedly. 

Instead, she had a pressing need not to die alongside that asshole, so she turned her attention back to the starfighters. “Mandalorian fighters, please respond, we are not blockade runners, we are friends!”

They swung around in front of the ship in a wide arc, turning back towards them- they had a clear shot if they wanted it, and on the screen in front of her, the battle-computer bleeped shrilly about the missile lock. 

“Udesii, ori’haat,” she said, desperately trying again. “We are not blockade runners, I repeat, we are _not_ blockade runners. 

For an agonizingly long heartbeat, she thought she’d failed- there was no answer, the starfighters roaring towards them, and she closed her eyes in preparation for the laser fire...

... which didn’t come. 

She opened her eyes again at the crackle of static in her headset. “Unidentified freighter, you have ten seconds to explain your presence- this sector is under the protection of Mandalore the Lesser.”

After all the time she’d spent with Clan Vizla over the years, the accent was so desperately familiar and blessedly welcome. Rubbing at her aching head with a shaking hand- maybe she could get away with tweaking the injection rate of her implants later tonight, to compensate for everything she’d burned through today- she said “This is Ysaine Pierce of the salvage freighter Carmine Scimitar. We are not affiliated with the Republic, we are not blockade runners. Our vessel is registered out of Nal Hutta, registration code eight xesh nine dash-”

“ _Izzy?_ ”

She froze, panic making her skin prickle. “Who is this?” she asked, her voice cracking slightly and dropping an octave in her fear. 

There was a whooping sound through the comms, and then she heard “Izzy Pierce, is that you? You just won me two hundred credits!” 

“Brakka you dumb fuck, I did _not_ agree to that bet.” 

Ysaine stared dumbly out the transparisteel walls of the gunner port. “ _Brakka?_ ” she asked incredulously. 

“The one and only, my beautiful ori’vod, flower of all Hutt space-” 

“Brakka, shut up.” Now that her good senses were beginning to come back to her, she recognised the other voice as Jos. “Being stuck out here with you is punishment enough without you _talking_ as well.” 

From behind her, she heard a creak of leather, and glancing back she saw Captain Nuaru’s boots descending from the skyward gunner port. The large woman barely fit down the shaft, and it made Ysaine feel claustrophobic just watching her. 

Nuaru held a finger up to her lips to gesture for silence, and Ysaine flicked off the outgoing signal on her headset before nodding to give her the go-ahead. The captain nodded out into the black, towards the two starfighters that were far too close for comfort. “You know these folks?” she asked softly, the faded green tattoos on her large brown cheeks moving as she spoke.

Ysaine nodded faintly. “Clan Vizla,” she said, hardly believing what she was saying.

Lips twisting, as if in suspicion, Nuaru said “You chummy with a lot of Mandos?” 

She couldn’t escape the reputation of the Mandalorians, even on a shitbucket freighter in the middle of nowhere, even when she wasn’t even a Mandalorian herself but just knew better than to jump at her fucking shadow around them. “Yeah. Me and Mandalore are besties. He comms me every night to tell me about his day. What the fuck do you think?” 

Nuaru scowled. “You can get us out of this?” 

“Give me a few minutes,” she said, flicking the outgoing back on again. Brakka and Jos had kept up their bickering while she’d been hastily whispering with Nuaru; they didn’t even seem to have noticed she wasn’t offering her input. “Boys,” she said, interrupting them, “I gotta clear the water- you gonna shoot?” 

Brakka made a rude noise. “Do you know how much trouble we’d be in with Shae if we shot down her-”

“ _Friend_ , shot down her _friend_ ,” Ysaine said quickly, and loudly, knowing that Caliah and Nuaru were still listening in. “Yeah, I know. Doesn’t mean you’re not here on the orders of someone higher.”

“What, like Mandalore the Victimless?” Jos asked, and he and Brakka proceeded to giggle like misbehaving schoolboys.

Ysaine rolled her eyes. “Could’a gone with Vitreous, you know,” she drawled. “If you’re trying to stick to pretentious titles.”

There was a moment of silence over the comms, and then Brakka went “Yeah, actually, that’s better.”

“Yeah, I like that,” Jos said in agreement. “That is better.” 

Nuaru made a gesture for her to hurry up, and Ysaine made a corresponding gesture for her to piss off. “So, what, you here under his orders, or you here with Shae?” She tried to ignore the way her heart leapt at the thought of seeing Shae again- it’d been nearly six months since they’d last been able to see each other, and even that had only been for a night before their paths had diverged again. 

Shae had vaguely hinted at the fact that it’d be easier if Ysaine accepted the inevitable and joined Clan Vizla, taking up the oaths of a Mandalorian, and even all these months later Ysaine’s pulse still raced at the memory. It wasn’t a declaration of love or anything fancy, but it was obvious what the offer entailed. She could’ve had a family again, a place where she felt welcome and included and where Shae’s smile had the potential to be the last thing she saw each night before she fell asleep. 

But she’d laughed about it, and pretended not to understand the hint, and Shae hadn’t pushed it further. She figured Shae had to know she’d deliberately played dumb, but she hadn’t said anything about it. 

She didn’t want to be a part of the war, and Shae was fairly determined to stay as involved as possible, her blind hatred for the Jedi only growing with each day that went past when she hadn’t managed to track down her brother’s killer. Ysaine didn’t know what would be worse- taking the oaths of the Mandalorians and having to turn around and kill innocents, because this was war and Mandalore had united the clans and made a pledge to the Empire, or having to sit back and watch parts of Shae’s spirit slowly flake away, as the bitterness and the rage and the bloodlust slowly wore her down. 

She could see it already, just in the last few years, and the war wasn’t showing any signs of letting up. If she’d said yes, if she’d accepted Shae’s offer and stayed with Clan Vizla, she would have had to sit there as the woman she... loved, or something, slowly vanished under a cruel, violent shell. 

Ma’d tried to settle for a man with violence in his heart, after Da had gone and got himself killed in the war. And what good had that done, all those promises of a proper home and not having to worry about going hungry again, the excitement of getting a little brother, what good was any of it? Ma’d died at the hands of the man she’d settled for, and she’d be damned if she’d follow in her footsteps.

Not that she thought that Shae would be violent towards her or anything, or just- stars, she didn’t fucking know. She _liked_ her, probably loved her actually, if she allowed herself five minutes to muddle through the mess in her head and her heart, but Shae was Mandalorian first and foremost. The word she’d taught her on their first meeting, _shereshoy_ , the lust for life- she understood it a little better now, now that she was older and more cautious and had spent more time around the Clans. It didn’t just mean joy at the experiences life brought, not just happiness- it was revelling in the bloodlust, delighting in the adrenalin filled rush that came from violence and anger and hate. There was joy, to be sure, but it was far darker than she’d expected. 

So she’d laughed off Shae’s offer with feigned ignorance, because that was easier than trying to explain the miserable doubts lurking in her heart.

Stars, she’d fucking missed her though. 

“Little of column a and a little of column b,” Brakka said over the comms, dragging her back to the present. “But like we care what that mirsh’kyramud thinks, eh? Amirite? Aliit ori’shya tal’din, eh Izzy?”

Ysaine pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose. “Fuck, Brakka, you know I can’t keep up with you when you talk that fast. I have no idea what you just said.”

“He was declaring his everlasting love for you, Izzy,” Jos said, snickering under his breath.

“Ey! Shabuir, mate, you want I should go tell tall tales to your Valk, eh?”

Nuaru tried to catch her attention. “What the hell is going on, Pierce?” she mouthed silently.

Ysaine offered her a weak smile, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. “This is normal, cap, things are under control.” 

“They might just be stalling while their friends make the jump here.”

It was difficult not to roll her eyes, but she managed it. “Trust me,” she said, pointedly turning her back on her to look back out into the black. The two starfighters had drifted into her line of sight, and now that she was paying attention she could see the very obvious customization jobs along the wings and fuselage. She had no idea if the intention was to make it seem like they’d painted them while drunk, but... 

“Boys! If you’re done? Are we good here?” 

The bickering died off with only minimal grumbling, and then Jos said “Yeah, we’re good Izzy. Send us through the reg details and we’ll make sure you’re cleared for salvage work through here. Anyone on patrol’ll know to give you room to work.”

She physically felt herself deflate with relief into the chair. “Much obliged, Jos,” she said, wearily lifting an arm up to her shoulder to give a thumbs up to Nuaru behind her. “You want we should stay clear of any sectors in particular?” 

“Ah... maybe? Fuck, that implies I paid attention to the last round of orders from Mandalore.”

“Don’t go near to Devaron,” Brakka said helpfully. “There’s still skirmishes and shit going on up there, the Pubs keep trying to push through.” 

“Avoid Devaron. Got it.”

“Ey, Izzy- you got your same personal comms with you?”

She gritted her teeth at the question despite how it made her heart lurch, because it was just like Jos not to give a shit about the rest of the crew listening in while he asked personal questions. “Nah, Jos, I came all the way out to the Mid Rim without leaving any way for people to contact me, what do _you_ think?”

Brakka snickered. “Heh, yeah Jos, what do _you_ think?”

“You shut up too, Brakka, you don’t have nothing echoing round in your head but the wind either,” she said, very painfully aware of Nuaru and Caliah keeping silent while the boys nattered away. “I got my comms, so if Shae needs to get in touch at all she can. But I’m working, alright?”

They were giggling again, and if she hadn’t known them for years herself and knew that they were grown ass men, she would’ve suspected the two starfighters were being piloted by twelve-year-olds. “If Shae wants to get in _touch_ ,” Brakka said, and Jos giggled shrilly, “oh she’d want to get in _touch_ alright.” 

“Fuck off, you child.” She flicked one of the switches on the console in front of her, switching solely to internal comms. “Caliah, can you transmit the ship reg and the star charts we were working off?” At Nuaru’s sound of displeasure behind her, she made a rude gesture over her shoulder. “The Mandos aren’t gonna fucking steal your haul, calm down.”

“Wouldn’t’ve picked you for a Mando fucker, Pierce,” Caliah drawled, and then a moment later “Done. They are now free to steal all of Nuaru’s salvage and leave us destitute and floating between the stars.” 

Nodding to herself, Ysaine flicked back to the external channel. “There. That all you need?”

“That’ll do us just fine,” Brakka said. “But uh, hey, word of warning? If it’d been any other clan running this stretch, you’d currently be strewn in a thousand pieces across the Malastare sector, yeah?”

“Yeah, I get you,” Ysaine said with a grimace. “But where’s the thrill in private enterprise without the looming threat of death?”

“I hear you.” The two starfighters peeled away from the freighter, heading towards a more open section of space. “We’ll leave you to it then, yeah? Figure you’ve got some holes to patch up-”

“Sorry ‘bout that, by the way,” Jos called in a sing-song voice, “tell your pilot he feints too often on a forward right roll. Easy to anticipate.” 

From somewhere above her, in the vague direction of the cockpit, she heard a furious shriek. “You tell that unwashed, uncivilized barbarian that it’s a wonder he even knows which buttons to mash with his brutish fists to make his ship even-” 

There was a streaking flash of light, the two ships appearing to stretch out towards infinity for a brief moment, and then they were gone. 

Ysaine slumped back in the seat, all the strength leaving her limbs as she finally let herself relax. 

And then she lurched upright again.

“Oh, shit, _Jory!_ ”

____

Hours later, locked away in the tiny bay that passed as a bunk, Ysaine was slowly making her way towards her hundredth pull-up using the coolant pipe that ran through the room as a bar when her comms unit buzzed behind her. Groaning, she held herself in place for a moment, feeling the strain up through her arms. “Seventy-two,” she grunted, before easing herself back down to the floor; there was barely room to turn around in the tiny space, her bed little more than a shelf with a mattress wedged on top of it, but at least it was private. At least she didn’t have to share with Caliah and his seething mist of cosmetics that seemed to clog up the air down in the crew quarters. 

Pulling her towel off the pipe and wiping her face, she draped it over her shoulder and flopped down on the thin mattress, setting the comms unit on the power unit opposite her that served as a bedside table. 

Still panting a little, her muscles aching wonderfully, she tried to keep her nerves under control as she clicked accept on the comm. 

And promptly swore, lurching upright so quickly she nearly fell off the bed. “ _Fuck_ , Shae, what are-”

“Well, that’d be the idea now, wouldn’t it?” Shae’s laughter was as intoxicating as always, enough to make her feel drunk on the sound of it alone, but that wasn’t what had rattled her so easily tonight. Shae had set up her comm to face her own bed, where she was currently splayed wearing... well, wearing nothing. “‘ _Fuck Shae_ ’, that’s a plan I can get behind.”

Her pulse had soared to a thundering beat in her ears, and she could feel herself getting warm just from looking at her- oh stars, but there was so much to look at, though. “What the hell are you doing?” she hissed, glancing nervously at the door. It was locked of course, and it wasn’t like any of the crew would be likely to pay her a late night visit given that she’d stabilised Jory hours ago and left him to sleep through the worst of it, but still... “You can’t- is this even a secure channel?”

Shae laughed again, propped up on one elbow with her hair spilling over her shoulders and her bare breasts. “Aww, what’s the problem, riddur? Never taken part in a dirty holocomm before?” Even as she watched, Shae’s free hand was drawing lazy circles over her stomach, her fingers drifting ever lower with each pass. “And here I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

Her cheeks flaming and her loins burning, Ysaine couldn’t help but bite her lip as she drank her in. “I am, I’m- fuck, I’m really glad to see you, I just, I- I wasn’t expecting to, um-”

“Ysaine Pierce, are you blushing?”

“No! No, I’m- was working out. Pull-ups, you see.”

“I _can_ see,” Shae said admiringly, her gaze tracing the shape of Ysaine’s biceps, exposed by the sleeveless vest she wore. “Wish I’d been able to watch.” 

Her hand slid between her legs and she sighed happily; Ysaine couldn’t help the little moan she let out in response. “H-how are you?” she stammered, desperately trying to keep her head. “I haven’t seen you in, um, a few months now?”

“You’re seeing a lot of me right now,” Shae said. She let one leg fall off the bed, leaving her completely open and exposed to Ysaine’s gaze. “Don’t you like what you see, Pierce?”

“I do, I really do,” Ysaine babbled, and something in her tone must have given her pause, because Shae’s sultry look vanished instantly, and she sat up. 

“Hey, you okay? I wasn’t trying to start anything you weren’t comfortable with, I just thought-”

But Ysaine was already laughing, her cheeks burning with embarrassment and lust. “No, no, Shae, love, it’s-” She shook her head, almost disbelieving. “When I got up this morning, I didn’t think I’d be having comm sex before the day was over.”

“You ain’t ever had a dirty comm before?”

“I still blush when you tell me you wanna sit on my face, what do you think?” 

Shae’s chuckle was husky, because the damn woman couldn’t not be sexy for ten seconds. “I like sitting on your face,” she said with a shrug, the movement making her breasts wobble just enough to draw her gaze down to them. When she looked back up, Shae was grinning slyly. “Enjoying yourself?”

“You are _very_ distracting when you’re naked.”

“I strive to be distracting,” she said, running a hand absently over her breast and toying with the hard nipple for a moment. Ysaine whimpered. “You’ve had me missing you something awful fierce, so I feel a little payback is due...”

Ysaine’s hand had almost subconsciously drifted to her lap, to where her dick was beginning to pressing up against her pants. It was easy to just rub slowly as she watched her, even if she was pretty sure her skin was about to catch fire any minute now. 

“You should take your pants off.”

She giggled awkwardly, her voice cracking for a moment. “That’s uh. Um.”

“I want you to touch yourself too, and I wanna see it,” Shae said, her eyes alight with mischief and lust. “You know I love your body.”

Ysaine rubbed the back of her neck, grinning even as she struggled to make eye contact. “Okay, but like... it’s _really different_ when you’re here and you’re touching me...”

“You’re so cute, Pierce, you know that?” Shae’s hand was back between her legs, her knees spread wide as she lounged on the edge of the bed. _Fuck_. “You’re big as a firestorm tank and yet you’re shy and bashful and fuck if it isn’t the most adorable thing ever.”

“Well, you know, you’re sort of, really sexy- ah, I can’t really concentrate while you’re doing that?” Shae’s hand was teasing and toying, and she swore that if she concentrated she’d be able to hear the slick sounds as her fingers played. 

Shae chuckled. “The point is that you’re not supposed to be concentrating too hard on thinking, Pierce,” she said. “Sort of want you to go with instinct at this point.” 

Ysaine closed her eyes for a moment, not quite able to believe what she was about to do, and then climbed to her feet, her hands shaking a little as she reached for her belt. Shae made a sound of approval as she loosened her pants enough to tug them down over her hips, the fabric pooling around her ankles as she fought the instinct towards wanting to modestly cover herself. 

“Well, _someone’s_ pleased to see me,” Shae said smugly, her gaze lingering on Ysaine’s dick as she sat back down again. “Just as long as the rest of you’s just as pleased?” 

It made something warm and tingly bubble up in her, the way Shae always stopped to check in first. “Of course I fucking well am,” Ysaine said with a laugh, “just... trying not to die of embarrassment.”

“More blood in your cheeks than your dick, eh?” 

“Fuck off, you tease, that’s entirely your fault.” 

She was really bad at dirty talk. Like, intensely, awkwardly awful at dirty talk. Shae, however, didn’t seem to mind, whispering things filthy enough for the two of them, teasing and encouraging her with noises that went straight down to her gut in a blaze of white hot heat. She came far too soon, biting down on her lip and spilling into her own hand as she listened to Shae wail loudly in what she was desperately hoping was genuine pleasure and not just performance for her sake. 

Panting for breath and dazed, her whole body shuddering gently with the aftermath, she had a vague moment of unease wondering if she’d been loud enough for the noises to carry to the rest of the crew. She didn’t even want to look that smug Zeltron git in the eye if he knew she’d been carrying on with her- friend. Girlfriend? 

“Mm,” Shae said happily, sounding lazy and delighted in equal measure. “I needed that.” 

Laughing, Ysaine said, “What, going stir-crazy being ship bound, huh?” 

“Whatever Jos and Brakka told you about this being some sort of grand adventure, it’s a lie-”

“No, no, they were pretty explicitly clear about how fucking bored they were, don’t worry.” 

She could just about hear her smirking. “It was fun killing off a whole bunch of Jedi pilots, don’t get me wrong, but they fled for home with their tails between their legs weeks ago. The novelty starts to wear off after awhile.”

Ysaine didn’t really have an answer for that, because she didn’t really know what to say in response to someone being gleeful about killing Jedi. She didn’t like Jedi _or_ Sith, but she wasn’t gonna go out of her way to fight them, or butcher them, or joyfully celebrate their deaths like Mandos tended to. 

She didn’t want to ask if Shae had got to kill the one that’d killed Tam. She tended to avoid bringing it up as a point of conversation. 

“Hey.” She opened her eyes and looked to the hologram, to find Shae watching her with an oddly hesitant expression on her face. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Ysaine offered her a shaky smile. “You too, huh? I hear there’s some kind of war going on out here.”

Shae chuckled, the sound husky enough to send a delicious slither of warmth through her, despite already feeling sated. “Yeah, I hear that too,” she said, smiling wryly. “Funny, that.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for non-explicit violence typical of the Bounty Hunter storyline and extensive descriptions of an invasion/terrorist attack

_Port Nowhere, an unspecified system in Republic Space, The 23rd Year of the Great Galactic War_

“I’m not gonna help you cheat to win the Grand Hunt, Braden,” Ysaine said, slouched moodily over her drink at the bar. 

Beside her, the bounty hunter chuckled. “Oh, that’s right, you’re a grand old pacifist, aren’t you?” he said, nudging her with his elbow. “Winning friends and spreading peace across the galaxy with the power of friendship. How’s that working out for you?”

She cast him a withering look. “Just because I refuse to kill people doesn’t mean I won’t break your fucking nose for being an asshole about it,” she said warningly, slowly rolling the drink in her hand so that the liquid inside sloshed around like a miniature whirlpool. “Besides, every time I see you, you tell me you’re gonna win the hunt, and then every time I see you again, you haven’t. So, Braden- how’s _that_ working out for you?”

“Why you gotta be like that, Izzy? That’s hurtful. I thought we were friends, and here you are being cruel and dashing my dreams-”

“I’ll be dashing your _face_ if you don’t quit your whining,” she said, and then paused. “Actually, that was shit, I can do better than that.”

He barked out a laugh, gesturing to catch the bartender’s attention and pointing to his glass for a refill. As the Gran wandered over with the bottle, Braden said “Come on, Izzy, you can’t tell me this pacifist shit is paying the bills for you. What’re you, chasing down teenage runaways or something? That can’t pay shit.” 

“Not all of us are lucky enough to get private contracts from Republic High Command,” she said pointedly, waving her hand to decline when the bartender went to refill her drink. “Some of us take what work we can get and are grateful for it.”

“Yeah, but I’ve heard rumours you only turn in like, a quarter of your contracts, if that. What’re you doing with all that work if y’aren’t actually doing it?”

From somewhere behind them came a shriek, a high-pitched and plaintive sound one only heard from cornered, wounded animals. Ysaine threw the last of her drink back in one swallow, slamming the glass back on the bar and wiping her mouth clear with her arm. “Sorry, Braden,” she said, climbing to her feet and looming over him. The combat boots she wore when she was working added a few more inches to her already considerable height, the soles reinforced to support the jet boosters built into the heels, and she was easily the tallest individual at the bar. “Gotta go to work.”

“What, you’ve got a job here?” When she didn’t answer, he twisted in the stool and yelled over his shoulder “You owe me a drink!”

She ignored him, stalking forward. On the far side of the bar’s main room, on the lower tier, there was a spot where a large space had cleared around a scuffling pair; one of them, a big human bloke with more cybernetic implants than sense, was laughing as he held a scrawny yellow twi’lek girl by one arm, his grip firm enough that her toes only barely touched the ground as she desperately tried to break free. She couldn’t’ve been more than fourteen, tops- not that she was great at guessing the age of twi’leks, mind. 

But, for all intents and purposes, she matched the description of the bounty perfectly, and the trail Ysaine had been following these last four days had suggested she was gonna switch ships in a neutral port like Port Nowhere. 

Target aquired. 

Pushing her way through the crowd of gawking, hooting onlookers- many of whom skittered back in alarm when they saw who it was nudging them out of the way- she made her way into the circle of cleared space just behind the pair. The urge to be melodramatic was there, but instead she walked calmly up behind the hunter and jammed a small device against his neck.

He jerked back in alarm, a roar on his lips as he went to attack whoever had crept up behind him, but Ysaine had anticipated that, and activated the device. 

Most electro weapons could only be carried with a license, and even then the process to be approved for one under common law was immensely tedious. Ysaine wasn’t a fan of due process, so her heavily modified neural stunner was most definitely illegal. 

And as bad as it was to endure an electric shock normally, it was a hundred times worse with implants. 

She had first-hand experience with that. 

The hunter convulsed wildly, a bubbling scream issuing from his mouth as the electricity pulsed through him and shorted out every one of his implants. There was a faint smell of charred flesh, and then the unmistakable stench of burning hair; sparks fell from his free arm, and from both of his eye mods, and the twi’lek girl fell from his grip and onto the floor, fumbling backwards to huddle crying up against a nearby shipping crate. 

Figuring the charge she’d administered to be sufficient, Ysaine removed the stunner from his neck and clipped it back on her belt; the bounty hunter, in the meantime, swung around wildly to face vaguely in her direction, weaving badly as he dealt with the loss of his optics and the massive surge that had to have fucked up his balance too. 

“Bitch!” he howled, swinging a wild punch that had no chance of connecting with her.

She dodged it easily, smiling grimly as she stepped into his range. “Wrong answer, sparky,” she said, bringing her fist around in a wide arc that sent him reeling backwards when it connected with his chin, blood splattering over the floor as he staggered away from her. 

He spat a globule on the floor, wheezing as he put both his fists up in a fighting stance, though he was facing entirely the wrong direction to her. “The bounty is _mine_ ,” he hissed. 

“Pretty sure you’re not in a position to contest-” She didn’t get the rest of the sentence out, because he turned unerringly towards her at the sound of her voice and lunged, snarling as he tackled her around the middle and sent them both careening to the floor. Ysaine grunted as he knocked the air out of her, his shorter height far outweighed by his significant girth; alright, so maybe she should have given him more of a surge from the stunner, going off of how much energy he still seemed to have. 

He got a punch or two in against her face, and she could taste blood in her mouth; with a snarl, she managed to get her boot up between them, pressed awkwardly against his thigh as if she was gonna try and kick him off. Instead, she activated her jet boosters.

The bounty hunter squealed with pain as the searing hot flame burned straight through his cheap armour and into his flesh. In his panic to flail away, he managed to get her once in the nose with his elbow, purely coincidentally, and she saw stars in front of her eyes as she struggled not to blackout. Then her adrenal implants kicked in, sending her surging to her feet with renewed energy as she ignored the blood streaming freely from her broken nose. 

Her opponent was curled up on the floor whimpering, a bloodied smear across the floor and the smell of cooked meat and melted plastoid enough to make her want to gag. She stood over him for a moment, chest heaving as she waited for her head to stop spinning, hands clenched into fists at her sides. 

Apart from the music playing through the station, the large room was silent. 

She took a step closer and spat on him. “Maybe don’t take bounties for frightened teenage girls in the future, asshole,” she snarled, resisting the urge to kick him in the head only by the slightest of margins. The circle around them had grown even wider during their brief brawl, and Ysaine pulled herself up to her full height, glaring silently until they all turned away and went back to their own affairs. 

Up at the bar, she could see Braden shaking his head with silent laughter. 

She ignored him. 

Wincing at the pain in her nose, she wiped her sleeve over her lip to try and mop of the worst of the blood, accepting it as a lost cause until she could get to a ‘fresher to clean up properly. With a sigh, she turned around to look for the bounty, finding the twi’lek cringing behind the shipping container, wedged in against the curved wall of the space station. 

She held up both her hands to indicate she was unarmed, waiting for the panicked look in her eyes to recede slightly. Once it did, she extended one of her hands to her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she took it.

“Y’alright?” she asked, helping the young woman to her feet. 

The girl was so malnourished that her lekku looked withered against her skull, and she was shaking violently as she hugged herself. She whispered something tearfully, only barely audible above the thumping music in the cantina. 

“You speak Basic?” She shook her head, and Ysaine tried a different tack. “Huttese?”

“Yes?” she answered in the same language, her accent heavy but at least understandable. “I know some little.” 

“I can work with that,” Ysaine mused. “You’re Kol’aya?” 

“Yes?”

“It’s alright, you’re safe. We’re gonna get you somewhere where your old boss can’t find you.” 

“You not catch me?”

Ysaine offered her a gentle smile. “Nah, I’m here to help. Someone very special to me saved my life when I was very young and very lost, like you, so I like to pay it forward where I can.”

The girl looked puzzled, and Ysaine couldn’t tell if it was a translation issue, or whether she genuinely couldn’t understand someone wanting to help her just for the sake of it. 

She could relate. 

____

_Carannia, Serenno, The 27th Year of the Great Galactic War_

She was going to be sick. 

Thirteen years on the run, promising herself she wouldn’t do a single second in a cell for ridding the galaxy of an abusive asshole, holding on to the paranoia long after common sense told her anyone would still give a shit- no one was going to care about a decades old cold case on a planet tens of thousands of lightyears away- and sometimes it still crept up on her at the most frustrating moments. 

Like right now, staring through the fence that surrounded the Imperial compound on the outskirts of Carannia, and looking into the face of a man- a boy, really- who looked far too much like someone who should be dead. 

He was tall, maybe a couple of inches shorter than her, and he was broad across the shoulders just like she was. There was a lankiness to him, the gawkishness of youth still clinging to him despite the muscles on his frame and the swagger in his walk; his skin was a few shades lighter than hers, still noticeably brown though, and his hair had been shaved close to the skull, so she couldn’t tell if it was dark like their mother’s had been, or if it was more of the rusty brown that had belonged to his father. 

She didn’t need to speak to him to know it was Gabe- he looked so much like his father that it made her stomach seethe miserably, as if the day she’d beaten that piece of shit to death was only yesterday, and not thirteen long years ago. 

Kriffin’ fuck, he was only _sixteen_ , what was he doing strutting around an Imperial encampment like he belonged there, like he was completely and totally at ease surrounded by the instruments of war and ruination?

And here she was, having chased rumours of him across half the fucking galaxy for well over a decade, trying not to blubber and wail against a chain mesh fence like some broken-hearted widow and wondering whether it wouldn’t be better to just turn and walk away and pretend she’d never seen him.

He’d clearly moved on in his life, and he looked happy. Healthy, too, a decent size for his age. 

Fuck’s sake, she sounded like she was measuring a fucking fish at the marketplace, debating whether she wanted to cook it up for dinner. 

She pushed away from the fence, the metal rattling slightly, and either her movement or the sound was enough; she’d meant to leave, she’d meant to walk off and forget she’d ever seen him and let him live his life without the spectre of this older sister the murderer hanging over him. But something, maybe even just pure dumb luck, was enough to draw his gaze to where she stood, and she immediately froze.

For a second the smile stuck on his face, and his eyes passed over her after lingering for a moment with no recognition in his expression; she almost relaxed.

Then his gaze snapped back to her, his eyes sharp with intent, and she saw the way his body language changed from relaxed to alert. There was something almost... violent? In that look? Enough to make her step back from the fence in alarm, one hand going up to her mouth at the instinctive surge of panic she felt, looking at her brother who looked like his father while looking at her with the simmering threat of something unpleasant in his eyes. 

He prowled carefully over to the fence- there was no other word for it, the careful way he held himself, the controlled way he moved his body- and Ysaine stood stock still, watching him and holding her breath and trying not to cry. When he reached the fence, he reached up and hooked his fingers into the mesh higher up, as if he was hanging off of it for fun. 

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. 

Then he grinned, something dark in his eyes as he shook his head. “‘s not really you, is it?” he asked, skipping right over any sort of formalities and to the crux of the matter. “You’re havin’ me for a laugh.”

His accent was broad and rough, evidence enough that he’d probably lived with the street gangs on Ziost for at least part of the last thirteen years. It broke her heart, to hear his voice for the first time in so long and hear nothing but mocking suspicion.

She swallowed. “Hello, Gabriel,” she said softly.

“Fuck’s sake, it really is you.” He pushed off the fence, the metal twanging loudly as he turned his back for a moment, one hand on his hip while the other was on his face. 

Ysaine lurched forward, horrified that she might have made him cry. “Gabe? Gabe, hon, I’m sorry, please don’t-”

A roar of laughter interrupted her, and she trailed off hesitantly as he howled with amusement- not tears, as she’d assumed-, both hands on his hips as he rounded slowly on her. “You’re _sorry?_ ” he said, almost incredulously, and she stepped away from the fence again. “Oh, you’re _sorry_ , so that’s it then, is it? _Sorry_ Gabe hon, _sorry_ you lived on the street for ten years.”

“Gabe-”

“ _Sorry_ Gabe hon, I know sometimes you had to eat rats to make sure you didn’ starve, but yeah I said _sorry_ , right?”

“Gabriel, _please_ -”

“Please _what_ , Izzy? What the _fuck_ is anything you say gonna change any of it, ey?”

“I came back for you!” she shouted, tears in her eyes. “I came looking for you, ten damn years ago, and they told me you’d run, and- and I couldn’t come back home to look- to look for you, but I came back-”

He walked right up to the fence, not touching it, but close enough that she wondered whether he was going to throw himself at it to get to her. “What fucking good does that do me, Izzy? You came back, oh how nice, so glad you were able to clear your conscience and wash your hands of me so early on-”

“It wasn’t like that, you jackass!” Her voice cracked, dropping down to a lower range, and she had to swallow a few times to get herself back under control so that she could talk comfortably. “Why the fuck would I even be here if I had given up on you? Gabe, I’ve been looking for you and saving money to look for you every single day since I left.”

“Well then, congratulations.” He stepped back and threw his arms wide. “Y’found me. Case closed, mystery solved. Have a nice life.”

He turned his back and went to walk away, and threw herself at the fence in desperation. “Gabe, wait! You don’t have to do this, you don’t have to be a- a... a military grunt or blaster fodder or whatever they want you to be, you can come with me!”

He glanced back over his shoulder, something disbelieving in his gaze. “You think I’m here because I had no other choice?” He laughed, rubbing his hand over his jaw. “Fuck, Izzy, you ran off to the stars when you were sixteen no worries, but poor widdle Gabe, of course he got pressed into service ‘cause he ain’t got no other options, yeah? That what you think?”

She stared at him, a tear running down her cheek. “I don’t know, Gabe,” she said quietly. “I don’t know why you’d be part of this dumb fucking war when you don’t have to be.” 

He drew himself up, still shorter than her, but his chest puffed up with pride. “I’m black ops, Izzy,” he said, a gleeful arrogance in his voice that made her heart sink. “I’m fucking good at it too-”

“You’re sixteen, Gabe, how did you even get enlisted?”

Gabriel shrugged, a smug smile on his face. “Don’t exactly check the records of street rats, now, do they?” he said. “I tell ‘em I’m good, they’re happy, we’re all happy. ‘cept you, apparently, but you ain’t exactly been around these last ten years for your opinion to mean much, yeah?” 

She had imagined their reunion a hundred million times over these last few years, but she’d never thought in a thousand lifetimes that she’d look at her little brother and see in him a glimmer of the man she’d killed to keep him safe. 

“Just came off our latest op,” he continued proudly. “Did Nopsin before this, nearly got a promotion for it and all.”

Ysaine was already crying, so it didn’t make much of a difference for her to choke back a sob now. “Nopsin?” she asked in dismay. “As in ‘ _the Cleansing of Nopsin_ ’? As in that fucking slaughterhouse, with the warehouse fires and the apartments and...?”

He looked so proud. “So you’ve heard of my work,” he said, clearly pleased with himself. 

She shook her head, backing away slowly. “I- I can’t do- I’m sorry, Gabe,” she said, aware she was babbling and aware that the teenager in front of her didn’t give a shit about what she had to say. “I’m sorry, I’m just- I can’t- no.”

He shrugged. “No skin off my nose,” he said, turning his back and walking back into the depths of the camp. 

She spun on her heel, lurching awkwardly and nearly overbalancing, and marched away from the Imperial encampment and back towards the centre of town. As she walked, she tried to wipe the tears away, but more of them fell faster than she could clean herself up. 

Fumbling in her pocket, she pulled out her comms unit and plugged in a familiar number with shaking fingers, having to clear it once and try again when she miskeyed it. For several long seconds the tone buzzed as it attempted to connect, kriff only knows how many lightyears in between her and the recipient, and with each passing moment she convinced herself more and more that she was alone in her grief and her stupidity and that it was the wrong time of the day in wherever she was to answer, or that she was too busy to-

There was a click, and the image flicked on to show a half asleep Shae, her hair flat on one side from where she’d been lying. 

“Mm,” she mumbled, flopping back down again and lying beside the comm, “wha’?”

Ysaine let out a choked sound, trying to hold back on a sob. “Sorry, did I wake you?”

Shae lifted her head, more alert at the sound of her voice even if she was still blinking in confusion. “Nah, I was fuckin’ tap-dancing,” she said, rubbing at her eyes. “‘s happened?” 

The fact that she was crying was clearly a dead giveaway that something was wrong, but she still appreciated her picking up on it. “I- are you busy?”

“What’s wrong, mesh’la? Hey, baby, you okay?” 

She tried to laugh, but it came out like a hiccuped whimper instead. “ _No_ ,” she said. 

Shae was sitting up by now, not bothering to tuck the sheets around herself proper. “Hey, shh, it’s okay- where are you cyar’ika, let me send someone to come get you.”

Ysaine shook her head, still trying to laugh. “Serenno,” she managed.

“Serenno? What the fuck are- you know what, never mind. We can talk about it in a bit. I’ll have someone there in an hour or so, okay?”

It wasn’t okay and she wasn’t sure if she was going to be okay but she still nodded all the same. She wasn’t sure she trusted herself to speak.

“Hey.” Shae looked tired- she hadn’t seen her in five months, not since they’d last had another falling out about Shae’s increasing involvement in the war and her fanatical quest to kill more Jedi. It was an old argument at this point, and one they’d rehashed a thousand times over, and usually once they’d both calmed down and had a few weeks or months away to clear their heads, they’d settle into old routines again. She just hadn’t been expecting to call under these sorts of circumstances. “Everything is gonna be okay, you hear? We’ll get you home, and whatever’s wrong, whatever’s happened, we can deal with it together, and we-”

“I found Gabe, Shae,” she said, blurting it out. “I... I found him.”

Shae was quiet for a moment, clearly absorbing the news and what her current emotional state meant for that news, and then nodded slowly. “We’ll get you home, cyar’ika,” she said softly. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“Yeah?” she asked desperately, trying not to latch on to the fact that Shae had told her she was coming _home_ , implying she saw her place amongst the clan as a stated fact, and not just a point of convenience. 

“Yeah, baby, it’s gonna be okay. I promise.”

____

_Nar Shaddaa, Red Light Sector, The 28th and Final Year of the Great Galactic War_

It was the sort of thing that was seared into your memory afterwards, the sort of thing people would bring up in conversation in the years after- _where were you the day Coruscant fell?_

For Ysaine, the answer to that question was a bar in Nar Shaddaa, some seedy joint whose name she couldn’t even remember after, but that had been convenient in the aftermath of losing a fight with another bounty hunter. She was bloodied and sore and pissed off, and she’d half drowned herself in a bottle of some cheap knock-off Corellian rum, when someone had started shouting over the music. That wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, people were always shouting- this was Nar Shaddaa for fuck’s sake, and people would start a scrap just for thinking the other had breathed in their air wrong- but after a moment the shouting amplified, coming from more than one voice at once, and she frowned down at the bar. 

“Doesn’t anybody pay for bouncers these days?” she grumbled, her head throbbing from a bad punch she’d taken earlier, as she gritted her teeth through a new wave of pain. 

Then she heard actual words in the din, something about Coruscant, something about sith, something about-

-invasion?

She glanced over her shoulder, glaring in the direction of the disturbance, and found someone standing on the bar trying to adjust the settings on the holoscreen. It was currently showing some prerecorded huttball game, an old classic between the Pterathki Terrors and the Sand Crawlers from about fifteen years ago. There was a general groan of objection as the game disappeared, only to be replaced by the stunned face of a news anchor she recognized vaguely enough to know it was a local channel.

“Shut the _fuck_ up!” someone yelled, and after a few more moments of angry shouting, it died away to unsettled murmurs as the news reel continued to play. 

And her heart stopped cold in her chest.

The feed had a big red ‘ _breaking news_ ’ symbol slapped on top of the station logo, and there was a ribbon of rolling text sliding across the bottom of the screen with more details than what the footage was showing. The growing death count, the announcement of the Republic surrender, brief quotes from politicians and military leaders around the galaxy. 

There was a reporter yammering rapidly in Huttese over the top of the footage, trying to describe the immensity of what was going on, but there weren’t really words to encapsulate it. 

She’d been to Coruscant, once- some time just before the ill-fated Blockade of the Hydian Way, she’d decided to see what the fuss was about. She hadn’t thought much of it, really- wasn’t much different from Nar Shaddaa, when all was said and done- and it hadn’t left that much of a mark on her. But to see it now on the screen, the sky thick with clouds of vivid orange and black, reflecting back the light of the fires from below, while TIE fighters swooped and screeched over the urban landscape... every now and then, the smoke would clear enough for one of the Star Destroyers to be visible in the sky, the flash of their laser cannons blinding even over the crappy feed. 

A lot of the footage was taken from personal holos, shaky and lurching as the individual holding the comm unit screamed and ran in a panic, trying to escape the oncoming invasion; sometimes the screen went abruptly dark, before switching to a new viewpoint and they all knew what that had to mean. 

The sounds were deafening, the screams and the roar of the fires, the thundering boom of collapsing buildings and the high-pitched screech of collapsing metal as the layers of the great city planet folded downwards, the structural integrity destroyed. Entire capital ships came careening out of the smoke, surging towards the ground at breakneck speed with flames seething along the sides and chunks of debris raining down behind them. 

The bar was dead silent, the music having been cut off some minutes ago, as everyone watched in horrified muteness, as if the immensity of what they were seeing had stolen their ability to talk at all. 

“Early reports have indicated an unequivocal Republic surrender, with rumours surrounding the death of the Supreme Chancellor so far unconfirmed,” the news anchor was saying with the hushed tones of someone in complete and utter shock. “Word out of Dromund Kaas from the media relations department of the Dark Council is claiming an Imperial victory at the hands of Darth Malgus and Darth Angral- additionally, there have been unconfirmed reports of Mandalorian involvement in the invasion, with no statement yet from Mandalore the Lesser as to whether this was a joint operation, or the independent decision of the clans involved. So far no clans have come forward to claim responsibility.”

Ysaine was aware vaguely that she was crying, but not enough to want to think about the reasons for it, or the effort to try and stop it. 

Some of the footage switched to the interior of what was obviously the Jedi temple, going off the number of lightsabers flashing on the screen. It was taken from an upper balcony, and someone was shouting as they shepherded a group of children- _children_ , for fuck’s sake- down a side corridor at speed, urging them to hurry while all of them wailed and screamed and cried. Blaster fire landed around them, and the screaming escalated, and the person holding the comm started shouting for the children to get behind them. 

There was the buzz of a lightsaber screeching to life, and then the footage ended, switching to a new viewpoint that seemed to be coming from the square outside the Senate Tower. She’d stood there, had her holo taken, done the touristy thing. Now there were bodies lying about, imperial soldiers running through and gunning down everyone in front of them, while chunks of burning debris rained down around them. 

It was too much. 

Ysaine pushed up from the bar, holding a hand up to her mouth as she shoved her way through the dumbstruck crowd, elbowing her way towards the door without much of a care as to who she hurt. There were more people clustered by the door, trying to push their way in so they could see the holoscreen, and she was less than gentle with them as she shoved her way out. 

Nar Shaddaa never felt pleasant, but right now it felt muggy and clammy and her skin felt grimy and filthy and there wasn’t enough air around her and-

-and she slumped against a nearby wall and vomited, her stomach heaving as she sobbed, spitting up the alcohol and the bile that had started seething in her stomach at the sight of such horrific violence on Coruscant. She was crying, weeping really, and kriff wasn’t that a sight- a giant bounty hunter doubled over in the gutter on a seedy backstreet, throwing up like a kid with her first hangover and wailing like a lost toddler. 

She didn’t need to contact the clan to know that Vizla would’ve been involved on Coruscant- whether it was Shae alone, or whether they were all off enjoying themselves with the wanton violence was another thing, but whatever the answer was, she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know that the woman she’d invested nearly fifteen years of her life in was gleefully taking part in such wholesale slaughter, the woman she liked to think of as a safe space for her. 

Blaster fire in the temple meant that there were non-Jedi taking part in the attack, and they wouldn’t send normal Imperial grunts up against Jedi. 

Shae wouldn’t shoot at _children_... would she? 

Ysaine gagged again, emptying the last of her stomach onto the sidewalk, wincing as her aching head throbbed alongside the heaving of her gut. After a few minutes of breathless panting, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, grimacing at the aches in her body as she climbed to her feet again. She sniffed miserably, the tears still coming no matter what she did, even as the bitter horror swung around to furious anger and back again, and she decided that it was probably a very good evening to go to bed early for once. 

Stuffing her hands into her pockets, she glanced around to get her bearings and began to make the long trek towards her rented bedsit; she’d only gone a couple of hundred metres down the street when she heard the unmistakeable sound of crying, and her steps slowed. Tonight was a night where she wouldn’t normally have thought much of someone crying in public- not with the news coming out of the Core Worlds, blaring over every available holodisplay on the damn planet- but the tears were most definitely coming from a child, and a young one at that.

The memory of the Jedi children screaming on the holo was fresh in her memory, and she slowed to a halt as she tried to track the source of the noise. She pushed her sleeve up to reveal her wrist scanner, keying in a few commands and waiting for the cheap device to do its work; she really needed to buy a better one, but work hadn’t been so good these last few months, and cheap and functional was better than expensive and non-existent. After a moment, the little screen flashed a ping off to her right, and she turned towards a warehouse entrance and the skeletal frame of abandoned scaffolding propped up against it. There were sheets of plastoid hanging from it, fluttering gently in the hot air, and she pulled down her optic enhancer to zoom in on the tiers, the heat sensors picking up the glowing outline of a child and what was very clearly an adult looming over them. 

The wild flux of emotions in her solidified immediately into one clear emotion- rage. 

She pulled her blaster from the holster on her hip, synched it up with her optic enhancer to maximise her aim, and shot the adult in the back. 

They _dodged_ it. 

Blinking in alarm, Ysaine watched as the looming shadow of the attacker seemed to twist out of the way of the laser bolt, rolling from out underneath the plastoid sheet and onto the street proper in one fluid motion that was almost too fast for her to follow. She fired again, the anger morphing slowly into panic as the shot seemed to _bounce off_ the attacker, who was surging towards her at a speed that seemed to belie the laws of physics. 

There was a hissing crackle, and a beam of red light appeared in their hand. 

A lightsaber.

_Fuck._

She fired again, this time aiming directly for their face, and the lightsaber came sweeping up to block it, bouncing it back towards her where it slammed into her thigh. 

“Fuck!” she snarled, hissing in a breath as the pain surged through her, the heat of the bolt burning straight through her pants and into her leg. She’d already been in one fight tonight and lost, and she was light-headed from throwing up only fifteen minutes earlier, and now she was fighting a fucking sith. She really needed to learn to use her common sense a bit more.

The sith kept coming, and with nothing better to do she lurched backwards and fell into an awkward roll to avoid the incoming plasma blade, firing her boots to give her a bit more speed and to increase the distance between them. Coming back up onto one knee she fired several times in rapid succession, ruthlessly pleased to see one of the shots hit her pursuer just below the ribs. 

They howled from beneath the black flowing robes, and she fumbled at her belt for one of her incendiary devices, ripping the tag out with her teeth before tossing the sticky grenade into the billowing cloak where it promptly latched onto the fabric like a burr. A half second later and there was a whooshing noise, and thick green flames began to lick furiously up the sith’s back. They howled and spun, trying desperately to bat at the fire or shrug off the burning cloak, and Ysaine took advantage of their distraction to fire again, this time managing to land three out of five hits. 

The sith snarled and hurled their lightsaber at her, the glowing red blade arcing through the air towards her; she swore and ducked, but not fast enough. She still felt the burn of it as it seared against her left arm, and she clutched the burned limb to her chest with a series of violent curses in a dozen languages. 

The flames were still growing- it was an illegal mix, a chemical cocktail that wouldn’t be extinguished by water, but she’d never had the opportunity to use it against a Force user before. Truth be told, she’d never actually used it against a _person_ before, much preferring to use it as a barrier to stop any pursuers when she was trying to escape. The screams of the sith as it licked over their body was _horrifying_ , and keeping her injured arm held close to her side, she lifted her good arm and took aim, the blaster still synced to the optic enhancer.

The sith turned towards her at the last moment, eyes glowing yellow and red, and she fired. 

The bolt struck them between the eyes and they went hurtling backwards, coming to lie still and mostly quiet against a lamp post as the flames slowly ate their way through their body. 

If she hadn’t emptied her stomach fifteen minutes ago, she would have thrown up again. As it was, she limped over to the body, holding a hand up to her nose and trying not to gag as she tried to check that they were definitely dead- sort of hard when she couldn’t get close enough for fear of the flames catching on her skin too. For good measure, she unloaded a few rounds into the body, her blaster blaring loudly at her when it overheated, and even then she waited for it to cool down before repeating the process again. 

It wasn’t like she hadn’t killed people before, but she’d never been stupid enough to go up against a Force user. Fuck. 

The lightsaber was lying on the other side of the street, humming ominously, and she picked it up tentatively between two fingers, trying to figure out how to turn the damn thing off. She could probably sell it, get a good price for it, but she’d be damned if she was going to leave something as dangerous as a lightsaber just lying around in the Red Light sector. 

There was a clatter behind her, of something falling from a height, and she spun on her heel, half expecting to see the sith lunging at her. When there was nothing but the gentle movement of the plastoid sheets on the scaffolds, her heart slowly eased back to a less frantic pace. 

She hobbled over to the scaffolding, half expecting the kid to have scampered the moment she’d distracted the sith; she was still there, though, crouched down in the darkness in a tiny ball, staring sullenly up at her from the shadows. 

Ysaine crouched down to be on a more even level with her, nearly passing out from the pain the movement sent through her from her thigh. Tonight was gonna require a whole lot of painkillers and then some. 

“Hey,” she said, keeping her tone neutral, “y’okay?”

The girl didn’t answer, her gaze almost calculating as she stared at her. 

Wasn’t her first time dealing with unhappy, abused kids, but she couldn’t say she’d ever had one being chased by a sith before. _She’d killed a fucking sith, stars almighty_. “He’s not gonna hurt you anymore,” she said carefully. “You got somewhere you can go, somewhere safe?”

She still didn’t answer, though her gaze drifted to the gun at her belt, and Ysaine felt it start vibrating in her holster the moment before it went lurching out through the air; she caught it with ease, snatching it out of reach of the girl’s grasping hands. “Hey, hey now, none of that shit thanks,” she said, eyeing her with renewed caution. So the girl was a Force user too, just her fucking luck. “That’s mine, not yours, okay?”

The girl pouted sullenly, wrapping her arms back around her bony knees again and staring at her from under her messy fringe. 

Ysaine sighed, rubbing at her temples wearily. “You got a name?” As the girl just stared at her, she fought the urge to cuss at her. “C’mon kid, give me something to work with. Are there more of these guys coming after you? Do you need help?”

Finally something changed in the girl’s expression, a sense of trepidation creeping into her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said softly, her voice tinged with a very proper Imperial accent. 

Great. So the kid was probably a runaway sith, going off all the evidence. “You got somewhere you can go?” Ysaine asked again, and the girl shook her head. “Do you want me to take you somewhere safe?”

At the girl’s furious headshaking, she pinched the bridge of her nose, where it still ached sometimes from where it had broken a few years ago. “I can’t just leave you here, kid, I’ve got a duty of care. Gimme something to work with, please?” 

The girl hesitated, and then finally said quietly “My name is Kira.”

“Okay, Kira, thank you.”

“Are you a bounty hunter? Are you here to take me back?”

 _Back?_ “I’m a bounty hunter, kid, but trust me- I’ve got no interest in seeing children get hurt.” At Kira’s suspicious glare, she sighed again. “It’s the truth- you got somewhere safe to go, or someone I can leave you with?”

“I can take care of myself.”

She was quite proud of herself for reigning in most of her sarcasm. “Yeah, it _definitely_ looked like you were doing a bang-up job of that just now,” she said. _Stop sassing the infant, Ysaine._ “Fine, if I give you credits, have you got the good sense to know how to use them? Or am I gonna turn around and find you getting mugged around the next corner?”

“I don’t need advice from a _commoner_ ,” the girl sniffed haughtily, and Ysaine fought the urge to roll her eyes.

She dug around in her belt pouch and fished out a handful of credits, reaching forward to hand them to the girl. When Kira hesitated, Ysaine jangled the chips noisily in her hand. “C’mon, kid, you’re not gonna get a better offer than this.”

Her eyes darted again to her belt. “I want the lightsaber,” she said stubbornly, her lower lip sticking out fiercely.

“Well, you can’t _have_ the lightsaber, because I’m not in the habit of giving lethal plasma weapons to infants.”

“I’m not an infant! I’m a-” She snapped her mouth shut very audibly, her hand going up to her mouth as if she was trying to smother the secret before it came out. 

“Definitely not a sith, now, are you?” Ysaine finished for her. “That’d be dangerous to admit, being a sith, especially if you’re trying to hide from other sith, yeah? So you’re definitely not a sith, are you?” 

Kira stared sullenly at her before quietly replying “I’m not a sith, no.” 

Ysaine leaned over and took her hand in hers, prying open her fingers open to place the credits in her grubby little palm. “Take these,” she said, “and then I want you to go back to the main boulevard and follow it down to a street called Nal Bidu Avenue. Turn left, and if you follow that for three blocks, there’s a medical clinic on the right. Go in there, and ask for Doctor Cordovich, and tell her that Izzy sent you. She’ll get you cleaned up, and get you on your feet. Okay?”

When the girl didn’t answer, Ysaine tightened her grip on her hand. “Repeat it back to me.”

With careful precision, Kira repeated it back to her, still sullen as always, but the instructions at least were clear. Nodding in satisfaction, Ysaine let her go and climbed wearily back to her feet, her entire body throbbing. “Stay safe, kid,” she said, sketching her a vague salute before climbing out from under the plastoid sheets. 

Everything hurt- her body, her heart, her soul. If she glanced upwards, she could see the neon billboards that were normally given over to peddling smut and sex clubs blasting footage of the Coruscant attacks instead. The streets were eerily quiet. 

Where was she the day Coruscant fell? Saving a sith kid, and wondering whether the woman she loved had killed jedi kids.


	6. Chapter 6

_It’s not as hard to say goodbye as she thinks it is, although part of her thinks it’s worse._

_She has her limits. She’s not gonna let herself be pushed around and hurt and asked to keep her mouth shut about the things that upset her, like her Ma did. She pushes back when she’s pushed, and she doesn’t take to being hurt without a fight._

_Shae is unapologetic, ruthlessly pleased with what she’s done even if she didn’t get a chance to face Aurei Eadon in person. That’s the Jedi’s name, she knows that now- the Jedi who killed Tam, who turned Shae’s casual delight for battle into a violent vendetta that’s built into something toxic and unfathomable. She doesn’t blame him, even if she resents him, because his choices are his own, just as Shae is responsible for hers; it was Shae’s choice to walk down this path, sliding a little further away from her every day and every week and every year._

_A little more angry, a little more violent, a little more obsessed._

_A little easier for Ysaine to pull away from._

_Coruscant is the last straw, in the same way that a surface to air missile can knock over a house of cards. It wouldn’t take much to send it scattering to the ground anyway, but the thing that does leaves the flimsi in burnt flakes strewn across half a click._

_Ysaine isn’t interested in hearing Shae’s excuses, and thankfully Shae’s not interested in trying to come up with any. After this many years, they understand each other perfectly, which probably makes it hurt all the more- Shae had to know how much this would destroy her, how much the decision to take part in the invasion was like a spit in the face on everything she believed in._

_It’s not much of an argument. There’s no shouting, no screaming, no hysterical threats and begging. It’s remarkably cold, actually, and horrifyingly civil._

_She’s proud of herself for not crying._

_Well, not in front of Shae, anyway. She cries later, when she’s alone, and she loses a couple of weeks._

_When she’s next lucid enough to be aware of the world around her, the galaxy is at peace._

_The Cold War has begun._

____

_Nar Shaddaa, Red Light Sector, The 1st Year of the Cold War_

“Honestly, Elsie, it’s fine,” she said, hefting the crate against one hip and trying to get it to balance there. Damn her skinny hips- good thing she never had kids, she’d be terrible for trying to cart them around. “You’ve been so good to me, holding on to this stuff for so many years. It’s high time I got out of your hair, anyway, see if we can’t fill that store room of yours with something more useful.”

Doctor Cordovich was older, greyer, more worn around the edges; cleaning up after the dregs in a bad part of Nar Shaddaa would take its toll on anyone, even a woman as indomitable as the little doctor, and Elspeth has been at it for nearly twenty years now. From the other room in the tiny apartment on top of the clinic, she could hear Giza singing softly, and it was nice at least to see the two of them still happy after so long, and so much stress. 

It made something in her chest ache, and she tried not to think of Shae. 

Elspeth sighed, looking down at the mug in her hand. “Will you at least stay for tea, then?” she asked. “I’d offer you caf, but Giza can’t have the caffeine, it doesn’t agree with her.”

Ysaine smiled sadly. “Elsie, you say that like I didn’t spend the better part of four years just downstairs,” she said. “I know there’s never any caf in your house.” 

“Forgive an old lady her memory, but you take it no milk and... half a sugar?”

“Yes, unless it’s jeru, in which case I don’t need the extra sugar.”

“Stars above, you think I’d keep that noxious sugar syrup masquerading as a drink in my home?” Elspeth was already moving into the kitchen, hunting around in the absently messy storage hatches for a clean mug. “Put the crate down, girl, you’ll hurt your back standing there like that, holding it at an angle. Didn’t I teach you anything?”

Laughing under her breath, Ysaine said “Apparently not,” setting the crate down by the door as she did so. 

“You look thin,” Elspeth called; Ysaine rolled her eyes towards the ceiling in a silent plea for strength. “You need to be eating more.”

“I’m not sixteen anymore, Elsie.”

“Exactly.” A mug appeared in front of her, and Elspeth lumbered around the table and plonked herself down in the seat opposite, her dark eyes narrowed as she assessed her. “You should be doing a better job of taking care of yourself, instead of leaving an old lady like me to do it.” 

Taking a sip of the tea, and wincing when it turned out to be a smidgen too hot, Ysaine took her time to find the right answer. “I’m fine, Elsie, really.”

“You might be good at lying to yourself- although honestly I’d question that-, but I’ve had a lifetime of dealing with patients lying to me-”

With a surge of irritation, Ysaine said “I’m not your patient, Elspeth.”

Elspeth shrugged. “You are my friend, and I’ve watched you grow. I suppose it would be inappropriate of me to say I consider you like a daughter to me, but I’d certainly like to hope you think of me as you would a favoured aunt. Someone you can trust, and who you know has your best interests at heart.”

For a moment, Ysaine could only stare, and then she was blinking rapidly. “Kriffin’ damn it, Elsie,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, “why you gotta go and say a thing like that and turn me into a damn faucet?”

“I admit I say it out of selfishness, in the hope that I’ll get you to listen to me for once,” she said, holding her mug between both her hands with a solemn expression on her face. “You haven’t been to see the endocrinologist in over a year- I know, because they sent a comm here, trying to get hold of you. You’ve lost weight, you’re packing up your things even though you haven’t lived or worked here in damn near a decade, so what’s the big rush all of a sudden, hmm?” The look on her face seemed to cut straight through the layers of bravado and down to her soul. “What’s going on, Izzy? Come on, now.”

“I...” She couldn’t say she’d been expecting a grilling like this when she’d stopped by, but honestly it wasn’t surprising. Elspeth always had a way of reading people. “I don’t know...”

“You take your time, you’ve got a full mug there. Have a drink and settle yourself a little, and we’ll talk.”

Tea, that was a good idea, she had tea, that was something she could distract herself with for a moment. Her hands were shaking when she lifted it to her mouth, enough that a little bit of the drink sloshed onto the table; Elsie waved a hand to dismiss it, when Ysaine went to apologise for the small mess. 

“Eh, what’s a little more mess in this place, honestly. Now come on- is it that brother of yours? You haven’t talked to him again, have you?”

Ysaine shook her head, setting the mug back down and carefully swallowing the mouthful of tea despite the complaints of her stomach. “No, ah... no, it’s not Gabe. I kept tabs on him for the first year or so, but after that... it was, uh, a bit too much. He was, um-”

“A career soldier?” At Ysaine’s nod, Elspeth grimaced. “I am sorry, my dear. If I could have, I would have given you the money to go looking for him sooner-”

“No, no, Elsie, come on,” Ysaine said, reaching over the table and putting her hand over Elspeth’s. “Come on, that’s not fair on you. You took in a scrawny little teenage runaway with no experience and nothing to recommend her, and you gave me- fuck, you gave me _everything_.”

“Language,” Giza called from the next room over, and Ysaine promptly winced.

Elspeth was smiling fondly. “Your happiness is important to me- to _both_ of us.”

“I know, I know that,” Ysaine said. “I wouldn’t be here today if that wasn’t the case.” 

“So what is it? If it’s not the boy, it can only be that girl of yours.”

Ysaine felt the smile drain from her face, though she tried to keep a brave face on for Elspeth’s sake; she laughed softly, her gaze going down to her drink. “If it’s not family, it’s love, that it Elsie?” she asked quietly. “Can’t just be stress about the war, or some kind of mid-life crisis?”

Elspeth made a scoffing noise. “You’re only thirty-two, girl, come speak to me about a mid-life crisis when you’re my age,” she said pointedly. “And it was never our war, not out in this part of the galaxy, so don’t go lying to me pretending this posturing both sides are doing is of any concern to us out here.”

She pulled the mug a little closer towards her, her shoulders hunched a little as if she was trying to curl in on herself. “Lotta people died, Elsie.”

“Lots of people die every day, Ysaine Pierce, so do you have their deaths on your conscience too? Why only the people killed in war, hmm? Or do you somehow feel your esteemed opinion would have been enough to change the tide of the war, and your silence condemned people to death?”

“I could’ve talked to Shae,” she said, the words snapping out of her a little harsher than she intended them to. Elspeth just raised her eyebrows, and Ysaine sighed, hunched over her drink. “I could’ve... I dunno, tried to make her understand-”

“We do not fall in love with people because of who they _could_ be, Izzy,” Elspeth said gently.

She bristled. “What, so it’s too much to ask the woman who’s supposed to love me to not enjoy being a mass murderer?” 

Elspeth sighed, looking troubled. “No, not at all, Izzy,” she said, “what I was trying to say is that we do not look at a person and think ‘ _with enough time and energy and heartache on my part, they might be someone worth spending my life with_ ’. We look at a person, and we love them, even with the jagged edges- it’s not always easy, and sometimes it hurts, but love is seldom rational like that.”

“Yeah, well, sometimes the jagged edges are a bit too jagged for my tastes,” Ysaine said, not even bothering to hide the bitterness in her voice. 

For a long moment, Elspeth didn’t answer, and it occurred to her that at some point Giza had stopped singing too; she wondered if she was listening in from the other side of the wall, eavesdropping on poor little Izzy Pierce baring her broken heart. Finally Elspeth shifted in her chair, her expression surprisingly neutral. “Sometimes that does happen,” she agreed quietly. “And in those cases, it’s good to prioritise yourself- let your own wounds heal for a time, where you’ve been rubbed raw.”

Ysaine snorted. “That supposed to be a dirty joke, Elsie?” 

Giza sighed as she came through from the other room, heading for the kitchen. “You are incorrigible, Miss Pierce,” she said.

Elspeth winked at her while Giza’s back was turned. “You give any more thought to applying to Commenor?” she asked quietly, her gaze piercing. 

“I’m not going to med school, Elsie, kriff-”

“Language, please, we’ll speak civilly in my home,” Giza called from the kitchen.

“I’m thirty-two years old, my basic education stopped after Ma died because her husband sure wasn’t interested in getting two kids to the academy every day, so, you know, it’s been almost twenty years since I was in school, no university is gonna take me on.”

Elspeth leaned forward, holding one hand up in a fist with a serious expression on her face. “One,” she said, raising a finger to count off, “you’ve got over a decade of hands-on experience in an emergency clinic, the sort of stuff that’ll make most of the kids sitting in those lectures pass out the first time they encounter it. Two, I’ve still got pull with the director of the medical school, so if I tell her you’re worth a shot, they’ll take your application.”

Ysaine huffed out a laugh, slowly turning the mug between her hands. “Commenor is in Pub space these days, Elsie,” she pointed out.

“It’s always been in Pub space, but it’s a little closer to the border now,” Elsie said with a shrug. “Close enough that they don’t take a lot of notice to accents and the like- although you ain’t had your proper Ziost accent in over ten years now, so you could pass for just about anywhere but Core, these days.”

“I appreciate it, Elsie, I really do, I just...” She rubbed a hand over her face tiredly. “I dunno if it’s right for me.”

“Well, alright then, but if it ever does seem right for you, you just let me know and I’ll comm a few folks.”

____

_She has an apartment, and isn’t that a novelty. One bedroom, small as shit, but she doesn’t need anything else- not when it’s just her, after all._

_Feels good to finally settle into something, instead of drifting from place to place, job to job._

_Feels less like she’s waiting on Shae, more like she’s moving on to something she wants for herself for once._

_She’s only had the place a month when someone tries to kick in her front door- probably still riled up over an argument over an old bounty contract, or maybe she slept with the wrong person sometime. She’d rigged proximity mines under the tiles back in her first week here, keyed with illegally wired genetic scanners to check for her DNA; scanners don’t find her DNA, mines go off._

_Someone kicks in her front door, and suddenly she’s trying to explain to her landlord why she can see straight down into apartment nineteen’s lounge room, and suddenly her rent’s a lot higher._

_But it’s hers._

_Now she just has to work out what she wants to do for the rest of her life._

____

_Dromund Kaas, Kaas City, The 5th Year of the Cold War_

It was raining, which wasn’t a surprise. She’d gotten used to the shitty ass weather on Dromund Kaas, by which she meant she’d done her best to avoid it unless absolutely necessary. 

Wasn’t like the capital of Sith space usually had much on offer for her, anyway. She could get work easier on Nar Shaddaa, and less likely to be coming from some megalomaniacal space wizard looking to off her once the job was done so they could tie up loose ends, or some shit. The Empire had had an embassy on the Promenade for as long as she could remember, so most of the time if she had to file paperwork under one of her numerous pseudonyms, she could do it there. 

Really, she hadn’t thought of herself as an Imperial citizen in over twenty years now, and as much as folk wanted to wax poetic about the terrible beauty of the sleek towers rising up from the jungle, she could live without ever visiting Kaas City ever again, thank you very much. 

But she would make special exceptions- like getting a comm from Gabe a week earlier, asking if she had the time to meet him to talk. _Talk_ , what a fucking innocent turn of phrase, as if she hadn’t spent the better part of the week wondering why out of anyone he’d comm her, wondering how he knew how to to find her in the first place, a thousand little what-ifs and maybes piling slowly on top of each other in an ever growing mountain until she felt like she was buried alive and panicking. 

Why would he comm her if not to finish the argument they’d had years earlier, or maybe to turn her over to the military police in some sort of delayed vendetta, to make up for his sense of abandonment at having been left behind? 

The rain had already soaked through her clothes by the time the bar came into view, some well-lit place down near the military sector; soldiers liked to drink, fact of life no matter where you went, so it was probably going to be busy, or at least bright enough that nobody would be able to hide in corners attempting an ambush. 

Her boots squelched unpleasantly as she made her way into the bar, trying to shake out the worst of the water in her clothes as she stood in the front room out of the spray; there was a bouncer seated at the desk, reading a datapad and frowning at her absently over the top of it. The cloak room behind them was half full of guns and military helmets, and there was a flashing neon sign above the desk refusing service to those who kept their helmets on. 

“You know, some species can’t take their helmets off,” she said, nodding to the sign. “What about them?”

The bouncer stared at her flatly. “Do you have anything to check in?” they asked, eyeing her dubiously. 

“What is this, a fucking restaurant? No, Jeeves, I’ll just have my butler bring the speeder around if I need anything, kriff.” She stomped through into the bar proper, the music muted and fairly non-intrusive for mid afternoon; similarly, it wasn’t as busy as she’d been expecting, only about half of the booths filled up and only a third of the seats taken at the bar. It smelled vaguely of smoke, even though she couldn’t see anyone with a cigarra in hand, and the jukebox was warbling some kind of mellow rock song.

If it wasn’t for the lack of neon and the blessed absence of a bone-rattling bass, she could’ve been back on Nar Shaddaa.

She spotted what looked like the back of Gabe’s head, sitting at a table on the other side of the room; she swung past the bar on her way over, ordering a second of whatever he was already drinking, and a spice beer for her. If she was gonna have to sit through another unpleasant family reunion like the last one, she was damn well doing it with a nice drink on hand. 

Ysaine made sure to make plenty of noise as she approached the table, clearing her throat loudly as she drew near. Gabe- and thank the fucking stars it was him, after all- glanced up at the noise, climbing quickly to his feet to greet her. 

He was taller again- still shorter than her though- and he’d settled into himself now, no gangly energy making him seem like he was too lanky for his own bones. And-

“Fuck, you got big,” she blurted out, before she could think better of it. “What the fuck’d they do, inject you with rancor DNA?”

Gabriel barked out a short laugh, looking slightly awkward as he rubbed a hand over the neat cornrows along his head. “Good to see you too, Izzy,” he said.

That surprised her. “Is it?” she asked. “Because last time it wasn’t so good, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” He gestured to the table. “You wanna sit?” 

The table had a half empty glass of something black and bitter smelling, the traces of yellow foam clinging to the sides leading her to suspect it was some kind of stout. Ugh. The ashtray had the stubbed remains of a couple of cigarras, and with no way of telling whether they were Gabe’s or whether they belonged to earlier patrons, she didn’t ask; he seemed to be in a good mood, so she wasn’t gonna ruin that by acting the part of the pain in the ass big sister and nagging him about smoking.

“So,” she began slowly, wanting to get to the crux of things as soon as possible. Rip the bandage off, so to speak, let it sting quick and fast so she could move on. “Can’t say I wasn’t surprised to hear from you.”

He made a noise through his nose, could’ve been a snort of laughter, she wasn’t sure. “Can’t say I was planning to be heard from, to be honest,” he said. “Thought you had a lot of nerve, coming to find me like that, tryin’ to be all tragic and sad and like I’d just been hanging around waiting for one word from you to be free.”

She winced. “That’s a good point,” she said, conceding it with a nod and a clenched jaw. “Kinda hard to reconcile the kid who was standing in front of me with the memory of the toddler I left behind.” 

“I stopped being your responsibility when you walked out that door twenty odd years ago, Izzy,” he said, his tone dead serious. “Let it go, yeah?”

“If I’d-”

“Nuh uh,” he said, picking up his glass and draining it, smacking his lips to catch the last little bit dribbling away. “You start getting all self-flagellationy or some shit, I’m leaving, I don’t have the patience for that shit.”

She gaped for a moment, before risking a joke. “That’s a big word for a grunt like you,” she said.

“I saw a dictionary once and everything,” he quipped in response, and she felt the tension bleed out of her. “Look, Izzy, I realise we didn’t get off on the best footing last time, and I was young and angry and a bit of a dickhead-”

“So, what, nothing’s changed?”

He pointed a finger at her. “Watch it, you old cow,” he said, “I’m trying to be a grownup or some shit here, peace offering and everything, yeah?”

Ysaine swallowed down the quick retort on her lips and said instead “I’m... I’m grateful for it, Gabe,” she said quietly. “After Serenno, I didn’t- I wasn’t gonna force myself into your life, if you didn’t want me there, so I’m... I’m glad. That you reached out.” 

He snorted. “Yeah, yeah, don’t go getting sappy on me or anything,” he said, sitting back as the waiter ran over their drinks. He gestured to hers with a wrinkled nose. “The fuck is that? Why not go all out and get a fucking umbrella and pink glitter if you’re gonna drink something that weak.”

Now it was her turn to point warningly. “Look, you, I got you another glass of your tar water, you don’t get to judge me on my beverages.”

“A stout is a hardy drink for a hardy man,” he said, proudly slurping at the foam on the top; it left him with a foam mustache and Ysaine cackled, shaking her head as she laughed. “What? Can’t a man enjoy a good head?”

She choked into her drink, and when she glanced back up at him he was grinning wickedly. “Gabriel Pierce, you did not just make a sex joke in front of your sister,” she said, wiping up the brief spill she’d made on the table.

“I dunno what the fuck you’re talking about Izzy,” he said innocently, “I was just talking about beer.”

“Like fuck you were,” she said.

From there, it seemed to get a little easier to talk, as if they hadn’t just skipped over a twenty year gap in their relationship and were just picking up where they’d last left off. It felt... well, it felt good. Not perfect, there were still moments of awkward silence and subtle tension when one of them said something wrong, but they weren’t gonna get it perfect on the first go anyway. They ordered more drinks, making sure to make fun of one another’s choices, and Gabe ordered the standard sort of bar food that was found the galaxy over, a basket of chunky fries and some kind of spicy looking wings arriving later.

“Do I wanna know?” she asked, gesturing to them.

He grinned. “They’re tasty, that’s all you need to know,” he said, smearing the chunky dip provided with them all over his first one before he took a bite, oil running down his fingers. 

They covered his military history as politely as they could- he was, at least, savvy enough to work out that some of the more violent aspects of his duties upset her, and he skirted around the details on those jobs. He’d seen more of the galaxy than she’d been expecting in the short time he’d had to serve in the war, and she was impressed with the descriptions of his team and how exhilarating it’d been to work as a unit. 

“You’re not with them now?” she asked, taking note of his use of past tense to refer to them.

Gabe shook his head. “Black ops stuff is run through Intelligence these days, so we got sent to different divisions,” he said. “‘s why I got in touch, actually.”

“Oh?”

He grimaced, wiping his fingers on a napkin before tossing it into the mostly empty basket. “We got used in an assassination a few years back- a Moff, some big shot who pissed off the wrong people. Dunno if he was working with the Pubs or if he was just doing a shit job, or if someone just liked the look of his office chair. Anyway, it weren’t long after that that we got disbanded, and we all started getting shipped off to the ass ends of the galaxy in the years that followed.

Ysaine frowned. “You’re still here.”

“About that,” he said, rubbing at his jaw. “Got my orders a few weeks back, and I’m shipping out soon. Didn’t really want to go without clearing the air in case... well, you know. In case I fucking die.” 

Her stomach lurched, and suddenly the wings and the beer weren’t sitting too comfortable in her. “Come on, Gabe, it can’t be that bad,” she said. “We’re at peace, now, aren’t we? No active battlefronts? Where the fuck could you possibly be going that’s that bad?”

He gave her a withering look. “Don’t play dumb, Izzy, you know as well as me that this galaxy is full of awful fucking planets that don’t need no war to make ‘em bad.” He sighed, almost wincing as he said “It’s Taris. Sort of... not quite black ops, but the Pubs are trying to turn Taris into their new project to show how civilised and enlightened they are, thinking they can save a dead planet, and so the Ministry is sending a task force to make sure that ain’t gonna happen.”

“But Taris is-” _poisoned, toxic, collapsing, dangerous, a lost cause_ , “-covered in those fucking ghoulie things.”

Gabe barked out a laugh. “No shit, why do you think I wanted to see you before I go?” he asked. “They reckon they got vaccines and shit, but let’s be real, that place is a death trap. I dunno if I’m going because I’m just a dumb pawn in someone’s dejarik game, or if they actually think we’re gonna achieve shit while we’re there.”

Ysaine stared at him, the hope she’d felt building in her heart slowly withering away. “You could leave,” she said quietly, cringing even as she said it. “Come with me, you don’t have to do this.”

He snorted. “Nah, thanks Izzy. Running worked out good for you, but I don’t think it’s right for me. Gonna see if I can turn this shit around in my favour, at least, before I consider desertion as an option.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said, shrugging. “I’m sure not. Well, apart from the fact that I’ll be on a shitty backwater with spotty holonet connection for stars only know how long. Where’s a man supposed to get his entertainment without the sordid corners of the holonet at his disposal?”

That brought a smile back to her face. “Oh, I dunno,” she said, finishing off the last of her most recent drink, “thought you said something about enjoying slurping on that head?”

“You filthy old cow,” he said, rolling his eyes as he smiled. “Speaking of sex, you got any kids? You ever knock anyone up to make me an uncle?”

She laughed softly, looking down into her empty glass. “Ah, tricky subject,” she said.

“What, you don’t got visitation rights or something?”

“No, nothing like that,” she said, waving a hand. “There was... hmm. There was really only one where it could’ve... been right. I mean, not to say I didn’t have the opportunity with others-”

“Cut to the chase, old lady, I’m dying of old age here.”

“There was one _girlfriend_ ,” she said, almost stuttering over the word; it’d been five years, it shouldn’t still sting the way it did. “She was- career focussed. We’ll say that, and leave it at that.”

“Heard you ran with some Mandos for a while,” he said, and she looked up at him sharply. He shrugged. “What? I had to do some digging to find you, and there’s some pretty outrageous stuff on the holonet if you look in the right places.”

She closed her eyes. “Gabriel, for the- please tell me you did not watch anything where-”

“Kriffin’ _fuck_ , Izzy, what kind of perv do you take me for? No, I didn’t watch any vids, I didn’t even see any vids. I just meant there’s like holos and stuff on old message boards, and I found a whole bunch of stuff from about fifteen years ago, pics of you hanging out with Mandos.”

Ysaine sighed, rubbing wearily at her eyes. “Yeah, I ran with some Mandos for a while,” she said quietly. 

“She a Mando, then?”

“She’s out of the picture, so she’s not important,” she said pointedly, hoping he’d drop it. 

“So that’s a no on me being an uncle, then?”

“ _Gabe_ ,” she snapped, her hand tightened around the glass.

“Alright, alright, sorry.” He was quiet for a moment, his hands clasped together on the table top. “You happy, at least?”

She thought about it for a couple of seconds, trying to decide what was the best answer. “Yeah,” she said finally, and it mostly felt true. “You?”

He chuckled. “As I can be, given where I’m headed,” he said, and then he grinned at her. “We did alright, Izzy.”

She was surprised to find herself agreeing with him on that. 

They’d done okay. 

____

_Bounty work pays the bills, but not as often as it should. She’s got a rep now, the woman more likely to hunt her employer than her bounty, and sometimes it’s hard to get contracts._

_She doesn’t regret it, but it does frustrate her._

_She hears through the grapevine that Clan Vizla have retreated from Mandalorian politics and secluded themselves on the far flung edge of the galaxy. She does work for Elspeth when her own work is light on the ground, and she sees the odd Mando come through. Tatooine gets mentioned more than once, and Ryloth a couple of times- Hutts are always looking for enforcers, after all, and they usually pay well. Rishi comes up a few times too, and they’re all in the same relative patch of space for her to believe they’re down there somewhere._

_She doesn’t know why Shae withdrew to the edges of the map, not when she’d thrown herself into Imperial politics so fiercely for the better part of twenty years._

_It occurs to her that she could just send her a message, ask her why she ran. Are you feeling guilty, she wants to ask, for the death you caused, or just because it upset me?_

_She reminds herself that the galaxy doesn’t revolve around her, and Shae’s reasons are her own. She doesn’t need to know them, because Shae isn’t a part of her life anymore._

_She proves it by taking new partners, no gender exclusions and the only requirement that they be of age and enjoy themselves with her. Not interested in commitment, just someone to have fun with for a while._

_Sometimes she almost feels distracted._

_Sometimes she believes that this life will be enough._

____

_Nar Shaddaa, Red Light Sector, The 10th Year of the Cold War_

There was a buzzing noise, and it took a long time for Ysaine to realise it wasn’t just her headache rattling around in her skull. With a groan she rolled onto her side, her stomach roiling in warning as she did so; with great difficulty she prised open her eyes, taking in the empty bottles strewn across the small apartment. 

Well. She could only remember drinking about three of those, so clearly there was a lot more to the previous evening than what she remembered. 

Behind her, someone moaned quietly, and she felt the blankets being tugged away from her; scowling, she craned her neck around with difficulty, wincing as she glared behind her. The deep blue skin of a chiss was only just visible peeking above the top of the blankets, all of which had now been stolen from her, leaving her naked on the mattress. 

“Make it stop,” came a voice from beneath the blanket pile. 

“Fuck you, Klue,” she grumbled, levering herself into a sitting position and hanging her head above her knees as she waited for the apartment to stop spinning around her. 

“‘s loud.”

“I’ll show you loud,” she said, wobbling as she climbed to her feet and scowled around her for a robe or a shirt, so she could answer the comm without seeming completely inappropriate. 

Her mouth felt like she’d been eating sand.

With some difficulty she found her bathrobe and spent a good half a minute trying to remember how to dress herself like a sensible adult, failing a half dozen times every time she tried to put her head through an armhole. Behind her, the comm continued to bleat merrily, and despite the noise she could also hear snoring- Klue, apparently, once he’d assessed the annoyance, had gone straight back to sleep.

Bastard. 

Yawning and rubbing a hand over her eyes, her entire head feeling like it was about to crack open, Ysaine settled down at the small table she had across from the bed, fishing out her comm unit from beneath a stack of dirty holovid discs from the night before. 

She clicked on the receiver. “Pierce here,” she said, her voice raspy even to her ears. 

For a moment, no one answered, and she sat there in a hungover daze, blinking slowly as she waited for something. It’d be just her luck to get a prank call when she had a fucking nightmare of a hangover. 

Then the signal flickered, and the picture appeared in front of her- a girl, a slip of a thing, tears on her face and fury in her eyes, even as she shook in what had to be fear. “Hello?” she whispered.

“This is Pierce,” Ysaine said, rubbing the grit out of her eyes again and sitting forward. “Who are you? What’s going on?”

“You’re Pierce? I mean, Ysaine Pierce? Or... Izzy?” 

“Yes,” she said, trying her best not to sound waspish. “Sorry, what’s this about? Do I know you?”

The girl wiped furiously at her face, trying to dash away the tears. “No, I mean, you don’t know me, but I-” She ducked her head, and there was a muffled sound like she was trying not to sob. “I don’t know what else to do, Braden always said you were safe, that if I was ever in trouble I could go to you for help-”

Braden? “You know Braden?”

She nodded. “I work with him,” she said, and then paused, before laughing almost hysterically. “I _worked_ with him. He’s dead.”

Ysaine felt her heart sink. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, but the girl was shaking her head.

“You don’t understand, they killed him, they killed him and I don’t know if they’re coming back for me, or what I’m supposed to do-”

“Woah, woah, slow down there,” Ysaine said, rubbing at her aching temples. “Who killed Braden? Let’s do this baby steps, what’s your name?”

The girl sniffed. “Mako.”

“Alright, Mako, good to meet you, now who killed Braden?”

“Tarro Blood.”

She knew the name, even if she didn’t know the guy personally. Also knew his rep. For Braden to come up on his bad side wasn’t necessarily surprising, but for him to take out a seasoned fighter like Braden was. “Okay, and what happened? Why did Tarro Blood kill Braden?”

“Well, we’re on Nal Hutta see, in Jiguuna, and Braden put together a team for the Grand Hunt-” Ysaine stopped herself from laughing only by the barest of margins, “-and I was the tech expert, and he had this young guy who he’d been training, and he said he was gonna do great things for us and win the Grand Hunt, and-”

Ysaine could see where this was going. “And that didn’t happen,” she finished, wishing her eyes didn’t feel like they were coated in sand. “Is Blood one of the other entrants?”

Mako nodded furiously. “He came and threatened us, and Braden said he was just posturing and not to worry about him, so Ni’keno and I- that was the name of Braden’s student- we went out to see if we could get an audience with Nemro the Hutt, and then while we were gone, while- we came back, and they were dead. Braden and Jory, they’d been murdered, and I- Ni’keno ran, he didn’t- want, I mean, he said-”

“Shh, hey kid, it’s okay,” she said, even as her heart broke a little more at the mention of Jory. She hadn’t seen that ugly son of a Nikto in nearly fifteen years, and now she wasn’t going to. “Are you safe? Are they coming back for you?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I- I guess they won’t, not now that Ni’keno has gone, they don’t need to kill me, but I don’t-” Her voice broke on a sob, and Ysaine’s mind was made up. 

“Okay, Mako, just listen to me,” she said. “You’re in Jiguuna? Where are you?”

“In the Poison Pit, it’s a cantina.”

“I know it,” Ysaine said, already digging through the mess on her table for one of her stim packs. “Alright, I’m just up on Nar Shaddaa, so I’ll catch a shuttle and be down there in maybe an hour. You reckon you can stay out of sight for an hour or so?”

“If they come back, I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them for what they did to Braden, and to Jory-”

“Hey, hey, easy kid,” she said. “What are you, like, eighty pounds soaking wet? Let’s not go throwing ourselves at murderous Mandalorians without some backup, yeah?”

Mako visibly wilted on screen, her face crumpling. “I just can’t believe they’re dead,” she said miserably.

“It’s gonna be okay, alright? I’ll be there soon, just keep your chin up.” 

She disconnected and leaned back, running both hands up to her hair and groaning at the throbbing ache in her head. After a moment of feeling sorry for herself she climbed to her feet and staggered over to the ‘fresher, running the water extra hot in the hope it’d sober her up faster. She tweaked the settings on her implants when she was dry, upping the release rate of some of the adrenals ever so slightly to give her a bit of her edge back against the headache. 

Dressed and hunting through the mess of her apartment for her weapons, she walked over to the edge of the bed and nudged it with her knee, strapping on her ammo belt as she did so. The blanket mountain groaned in complaint. 

“I gotta go to work,” she said loudly, taking perverse satisfaction in the pitiful moan that sounded from the bed. “Lock up when you go, yeah?” 

Something that sounded like a grunt to the affirmative came from beneath the blankets, and she took that as acknowledgement of her request. Checking her blasters as she headed for the door, she was already promising herself she’d make it an easy day’s work before she came home again. 

She was too hungover for anything else. 

____

_She’s a pacifist- well, as much as anyone in her line of work can be._

_She’s not in it for the glory, the accolades, the fame. She’s in her goddamn forties, she’s left it a bit late if she’s looking to make a name for herself._

_But she doesn’t like bullies. And Tarro Blood is the worst kind of bully, selfish and violent and cowardly when push comes to shove._

_She’s a pacifist, but sometimes she’s a bit too hotheaded to walk away when she should._

_And that’s how she accidentally enters- and wins- the Grand Hunt._

_She does it for Braden._

____

_Dromund Kaas, Kaas City, The 11th Year of the Cold War_

She’d always known that Mandalorians knew how to throw a party, but ten years can dull the memory; more than that, she wasn’t as young as she used to be, and the prospect of staying up til the early hours of the morning drinking and dancing doesn’t hold the appeal it might have in her youth. 

Mako, bless her, has had stars in her eyes for the better part of two days now, and she’d last left her in the gentle supervision of Crysta, who seemed amused as hell that it’d only taken a single beer to get her singing at the top of her lungs and telling people she loved them as they passed her in the hall. Gault had had a more particular look in his eyes, and while maybe she might have been inclined to indulge that curiosity at another time- she knew from personal experience the delight that was a Devaronian’s tongue-, tonight she was feeling a whole lot of need for personal introspection that wasn’t really conducive to a dirty, drunken tumble. 

The Mandalorian Enclave had balconies built out over the jagged cliffs that Kaas City was clinging to, and the drop beneath her was breathtaking, but somehow she didn’t feel frightened by it. Right now she felt peculiarly immortal, not to say that she thought she’d survive the fall if she slipped, but more to say that she felt somewhat removed from her body, as if it were someone else she was observing, and not herself.

If she’d been younger, she might have chalked it up to dysphoria, but tonight was an odd night. The Champion of the Grand Hunt, with a personal invitation to meet Mandalore himself. She’d already spoken to his messenger, someone else from Clan Lok, and she’d gotten the not so subtle impression from them that Mandalore was interested in bringing her into the fold, a power play to bolster morale and make himself look stronger in the process. 

To have the Champion herself allied to Clan Lok, well... wouldn’t that be something. 

“Always figured if you were gonna become a Mando, it’d be because you had my name.”

Despite a decade passing since she’d last heard that voice, Ysaine wouldn’t have forgotten it for anything. Smiling sadly to herself, she didn’t turn around immediately. “It’s funny,” she said, letting her voice carry back to the other speaker, “I always figured that too.” 

There were footsteps behind her, audible even over the raucous noise of the party inside the Enclave, and then she felt a presence at her side; close enough to touch, but not touching. “So,” Shae said, her voice even huskier with age, “the Grand Champion, huh?”

“It’s good to see you too,” Ysaine said pointedly.

Shae chuckled, the sound sending a roll of heat right down her spine, just like it had when she was seventeen. “I was getting to that,” she said, her hair loose around her shoulders; even in the darkness, Kaas City had enough illumination for her to see the pale silver streaks through the brassy red. “You look good.”

“I’ve spent the last year fighting for my life, but thanks.”

“Kriff, you’re just as fucking stubborn as I remembered,” Shae said with a laugh. “Can’t even compliment my girl without her hissing like a nexu.”

Ysaine swallowed down that ball of emotions in her throat, but her voice still cracked a little when she spoke. “Haven’t been your girl in over a decade, Shae,” she said. “Sort of thought we’d covered that back after Coruscant.”

Shae huffed out a breath, something like a sigh and something like a grunt. “Yeah, about that,” she said, turning to face her. Ysaine turned too, apparently helpless not to. “I’ve still got stuff to say.”

She stared for a moment, taking in the lines around her eyes and her mouth, scars that hadn’t been there a decade ago, the little spots of discoloration that came with age and which she knew she was starting to sport in places too. And then she laughed, shaking her head as she took a step back. “Fucking damn it, Shae,” she said, “you’re as fucking gorgeous as you were the day I met you, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna stand for your shit-”

“I’m sorry.”

Ysaine slammed to a halt, her mouth hanging open around the half-formed word. “I- what?”

“I’m sorry,” Shae said with a shrug. “About lots of things, but mostly about the fact that I was dumb enough to let my anger become more important than you.”

Ysaine breathed out slowly. “I’m dreaming,” she said softly. “I’m dreaming, I have alcohol poisoning, I drank far too much at the party and now I’m just dreaming-”

“Look, Izzy...” Shae ran a hand up into her hair, a flicker of frustration crossing her face. “I’ve had a lot of time to think, over the past ten years. At first I was mad at you- actually, I was fucking furious, if I’m being honest- but after that faded, I just had... nothing. Everything felt flat, and everything frustrated me, and it took me a long time to work out what the problem was.”

Ysaine didn’t say anything, just stared. 

“I can’t take back Coruscant,” she continued, “and to be honest, I still don’t know if I would, which I know is not the answer you want to hear. But I do know I wasn’t honest with you at the time, I didn’t tell you about it, I didn’t talk about it with you and I didn’t stop to think about the consequences to- to what it would mean for us.” Shae straightened her shoulders. “I was thinking about me, instead of about us, and it took me years to realise that I’d taken for granted the fact that there even was an ‘ _us_ ’.”

Shaking her head slowly, Ysaine did her best not to sound like she was on the verge of tears when she answered. “What do you want from me, Shae?” she asked, her voice only wobbling when she said her name. 

“I want the chance to make it better, cyar’ika,” Shae said, taking a step closer to her, reaching out slowly and brushing the back of her fingers against her cheek. Ysaine whimpered quietly. “I fucked up. I know I did, and I know I can’t take back the hurt I did to you, but...” She laughed, almost hesitantly. “I want to try. I know I don’t deserve it, and if you tell me to fuck off right here and now I promise I won’t ever bother you again, but I...” She ran a hand up into her hair again. “Fuck, I practised this, I said I wasn’t gonna get nervous.”

Ysaine blinked rapidly, trying to stop the tears from spilling over. “What, so, you just wanna wave your hand and pretend like the last ten years didn’t happen-”

“I don’t want that at all, riddur,” Shae said. “I want to try and fix every hurt I caused- I know the scars aren’t gonna go away, but I’ll kiss ‘em all the same- and I want to talk and just- fucking damn it, Pierce, I’ve missed you, okay? I don’t have enough words in any of the languages I know to apologise enough for the fact that I took ten years away that we should’ve shared together.”

An embarrassing noise escaped from her lips, and Ysaine clamped them shut in alarm, reaching up quickly to smear away the tears. “Um,” she said, hastily trying to assemble her thoughts, “that’s- that’s, um, all well and- and good, but-”

Shae cupped her cheek, her thumb brushing away an errant tear. “I love you, Ysaine Pierce,” she said fiercely. “I think I fucking loved you from the moment you tried to fight a Houk for me, all those years ago, I was just too dumb to do the right thing about it.”

Ysaine took a shuddering breath, trying not to collapse into hysterical tears. “And what would the right thing be?” she asked, her voice cracking and dropping despite her best efforts. 

“Join my clan, Izzy,” she said. “Add your name to ours, and it can be House Pierce of Clan Vizla-”

“You _cannot_ be serious!” Ysaine said, tears streaming down her face as she pulled away; Shae didn’t fight her, letting her go instantly. “I haven’t seen you in ten years, not since we broke up because I objected to you committing an act of terrorism. and now you suddenly show up like- like you can say sorry, and- and be apologetic and sweet and... _fuck_...”

“Marry me, Izzy,” Shae said, her expression completely serious. “I’ll say the vows right now, if it’ll make you believe me that I’m serious. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make things better.”

Ysaine shook her head. “This isn’t real-”

“Of course it’s real- what, you think I flew across the entire fucking galaxy just to pull an elaborate prank on you?” Shae stepped closer again, but she did it slowly, making her movements obvious, to give Ysaine plenty of time to object; when no objections were forthcoming, she reached forward and took her hand in hers. “I’m old, Izzy, and I’m tired, and I’ve spent too many nights over the last decade lying awake and trying to work up the courage to call you and feeling like the biggest shit-eating coward every time I couldn’t do it.”

She fumbled at her belt pouch and after a moment she pulled out a small velveteen pouch. “Look, not a joke- I got a ring and everything. I thought this’d be a whole lot more romantic, or that I’d do it over dinner or something, but...” She laughed once, and there was a particular glitter in her eyes that made Ysaine realise that she was close to tears as well. “Fuck, Pierce, I’m not good at this, I’ve never tried to propose to someone before.” 

With numb fingers, Ysaine upended the little pouch, a large plain ring of rose gold tumbling out into her palm. 

“Was sort of hoping it’d go nice against your skin, and I know you were never much one for flashy jewellery, so I figured something simple...”

Ysaine stared at the ring in her hand. A ring from Shae. Shae, who was standing in front of her, trying not to cry and begging her for another chance. 

Begging her to let her love her.

Hadn’t she had a hundred thousand fantasies about this in the last ten years? Hadn’t she cried herself to sleep often enough, more like a scorned teenager than a grieving middle-aged woman, dreaming of the day when this very scenario would come to life?

And now it was here, and she didn’t know what to make of it. 

“You know, for someone so mouthy, you’re awful quiet,” Shae said, trying to make it sound like a joke, even while it was obvious how stressed she was. 

Ysaine fumbled for the ring, holding it between two fingers as she held it out to Shae. 

She saw the moment the hope died in her eyes. “Okay, I apologize, Pierce,” Shae said, reaching out to take the ring. “I won’t be bothering you again any-”

“You’re supposed to put it on me, you asshole,” Ysaine said, biting her lip in the vain hope that the flash of pain would distract her from the need to sob. 

It was like a supernova had flared to life inside Shae- the light and the joyous disbelieving energy that overtook her made Ysaine laugh tearily, and Shae was laughing with her, crying and laughing, as she took the ring from her. Ysaine held out her hand- fuck, it was shaking so bad-, and Shae wasn’t much better as she slid it onto her finger. 

“I promise, I’ll do better at talking, and we can take it slow, we don’t have to rush back into-”

“Shut up and kiss me, Vizla.”

____

_Mako tells her she needs new armour, something fitting for the Grand Champion. All the great Mandalorian heroes have iconic looks, she says, so she needs one too._

_She thinks of the colour of Shae’s hair when it glints in the sunlight, and the colour of the ring on her finger._

_Make sure it’s in red, is her only answer._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With a quick thank you to Tiefighter and Garret-spork for being so kind as to lend me their bounty hunters (Klue and Ni'keno respectively) for very quick cameos
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone for reading, and I hope you've enjoyed the story as much as I've enjoyed sharing it with you all xoxo


End file.
